Elizabeth Ann Scarborough - The Godmother

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ONCE UPON A time in a beautiful city by the edge of the sea there toiled a young woman who did not believe in fairy tales. Fairy tales, she said, had no relevance to her life and none to the lives of the children she knew. She and the children she knew inhabited another realm altogether. "More like a soap opera," she explained. "You know, boy meets girl, boy and girl have children, girl quits job to raise children, boy loses job, boy loses girl, girl meets second boy, second boy abuses girl's children by previous marriage, children abuse themselves and their children unhappily ever after."

"You don't believe in happy endings, then?" a friend asked.

"No, I believe in happy moments," she replied, for she was even wiser than she was beautiful. Much wiser, as a matter of fact. "Which is why I love to come in here." Her gesture took in the ulterior of the shop, a place filled with rhinestone tiaras, Himalayan silver rings and silk kimonos, Indian saris sewn with golden thread and brilliantly colored gauzy Arabian thwabs. Not to mention the Victorian and Edwardian antique paisley shawls and velvet smoking jackets, the bustled skirts and flounced nightdresses that were the import stock making Fortunate Finery the most intriguing shop in Pike Place Market and by far the best vintage clothing shop in all of Seattle. "That white ruffled skirt is absolutely gorgeous. I don't suppose it's a fourteen, is it?"

"I thought you didn't believe in fantasy," chided her friend, who was the proprietress of the fabulous establishment where the young woman liked to spend her lunch hours and much of what she laughingly described as her disposable income. "It's a three."

The young woman sighed and turned her attention to an ebony Chinese shawl embroidered with peacocks in emerald, cerulean, aquamarine and gilt threads. She draped it across her upper body and admired her reflection in the mirror. The greens in the shawl made her eyes look emerald instead of merely hazel, and the black brought out the reddish glints in her curly dark brown hair. By no stretch of the imagination did she look like a Chinese empress, but with her dimples and clean-scrubbed, open, heart-shaped face, she could have passed for a character in a Victorian novel. Not the tragic governess. The good-hearted cook maybe, or the nice, but slightly boring, well-off school chum of the heroine. "Oh, no, I never said that," she replied, reluctantly replacing the shawl around the shoulders of the mannequin. "Fantasies are essential. Escape is essential, or life would be unbearable. It's when you start believing in your fantasies that you run into trouble."

"Did you learn that in school?" her friend asked.

"No. In school they taught us that we would be able to make a difference. They tried to inspire us with the notion that by helping a single junkie, prostitute or wino we would make Seattle a better city and the world a better place to live in. To the best of my knowledge, that's a fairy tale."

"Had a hard day, have we, Rosie?" the friend asked.

"I've had a hard day ever since the new governor took office, cleaned house in the administration and implemented her idiotic idea of a budget. So has everybody else working in the social sector. Our staff has been cut by half, our budget is down to zero and our new supervisor is a complete idiot. Of course, we're not suffering half as badly as the clients except that they're quite used to suffering and if we don't watch out, we're going to be competing with diem for street turf and cardboard condos."

"Oh, my, you are down. Here, have a chocolate. They're Dilettante." She referred to Seattle's premier gourmet chocolatier. She always kept a dish handy for her customers and her other guests, among them the panhandlers who brought her their pets to board when they had to go to hospitals or treatment programs--or got itchy feet. The city of Seattle would allow stray people to wander the streets, but animals found doing the same would be taken to the pound where they, unlike the people, would be fed and housed for a few days before being euthanized, if not claimed. Rosalie Samson had first met Linden Hoff because of the street pet shelter, back when Fortunate Finery was between Pioneer Square and the International District. Linden treated customers, street people and pets pretty much the same, and everybody was welcome to a bit of chocolate.

"I know. Linden," Rosie said, taking a bite from a truffle. They always are." She sighed, half with resignation, half with bliss, as the truffle touched her tongue. "I should be jogging or walking or weight training on my lunch hour," she added after demolishing the morsel. "It would be much healthier, and less expensive."

Linden Hoff, who had heard it all many times before, clucked at her and opened the door to the ugly-brown clad UPS lady, who hauled a dolly full of boxes into the tiny portion of the shop that wasn't covered in racks of frilly, colorful, exotic, or merely amusing vintage clothes. "From England, Linden," the UPS lady said. "Don't sell everything before I get back, will you? Sign right here."

"I'll save you something special to make up for having to wear that godawful uniform, Lenore," Rosie's friend promised. As soon as Lenore and the dolly left, Linden pulled a box cutter from her pocket and went to work.

Rose watched with bated breath. The things from England were what set Linden's shop a cut above the others.

"Surely," Linden said while slicing open a box that with very little encouragement frothed frills and spilled fringes from the cut. "Surely life doesn't always go as you say. Boy isn't always an abuser."

"No," Rose sighed. "Equality is actually gaining ground. We are seeing more mothers doing the abusing these days."

"Well, there men, you see. That proves my point. Things haven't changed so much. It used to be wicked stepmothers and witches all the time."

"You've cheered me immensely. Oh, this is lovely!" she said, holding up a delicate chain with a small crystal globe hanging from it. She peered closely at the globe. Within it was a single golden seed. "What is it?"

"Mustard seed," Linden said, shaking out a sixties-style white Nehru coat with gold braid and ribbon trim. "You know, from the Bible verse about there being hope for whoever has as much faith as can be contained in a mustard seed ..."

"Nope, don't know that one."

"Me neither, not exactly. Maybe it's not the Bible after all. Could be from The Prophet. Something spiritual. But anyway, back in the fifties and sixties, they were a very popular gift, and you were supposed to be able to make wishes on them."

"Hmph," Rose said, trying it on in front of the mirror. It accented the gold in her eyes. Funny, because it was small and delicate and rolled across her ample bust like a wagon across the foothills. Still, it showed up very nicely though it was unpretentious enough not to clash with the teal and purple flowered knit top and purple knit pants and jacket outfit she was wearing that day. In the winter doldrums after Christmas when the weather was usually gray and the mountains hidden by clouds and rain, the flowers and the bright colors helped cheer her. "How much?' she asked, fingering the little globe.

"I dunno. Don't tell me you might like it to make a wish on?"

"I can use all the help I can get at this point"

"What would you wish for?"

Rose thought about the clients she had to turn away because they weren't bartered enough, that is, not in immediate danger of being murdered for a couple of days, of the budget cuts which allowed families to be put oat onto the street and the disabled to have their benefits withdrawn. She thought of the stupid policy the new governor had pushed through the legislature that from now on the goal of family services was to protect the integrity of the family--that is, whoever was the strongest and in some cases had the biggest fist was to be protected and served by the agency. She thought of her caseload and mat of her coworkers--all three of them, what remained out of an office of fifteen. "Reinforcements," she said. "I'd wish for reinforcements."

"Ah, men you're wishing for a fairy godmother, is mat it?" Linden asked with a fond smile at her favorite customer.

For the whole damned city of Seattle? Sure, why not?" Rose asked, fiddling with the little ball holding the mustard seed. "Anybody, as long as she's more competent man Mrs. Melvin Hager. We need all the help we can get"

"In the face of such a selfless wish, I can hardly sell that to you. Go ahead, take it It's on the house. Come back tomorrow and I'll have all this unpacked."

"That's well worth a ferry ride on my day off. Right now I'd better get back to work. See you later."

In another part of that same city a fabulously wealthy young man had married a beautiful model and moved her into his palatial mansion overlooking ElHott Bay. This man had a daughter who was herself beautiful enough to be a model. In fact, the moment her stepmother's agent laid eyes on her, he begged to be allowed to sign her up.

The stepmother, whose career was waning, whose husband was younger than she and possessed of a reputation for playing around, feared for her identity if the girl remained in her house a moment longer. She sent to her Uncle Svenny for a hit man. Uncle Svenny had made his fortune in the most vicious end of the clandestine pharma-ceuticals industry and had at his disposal many consultants in various related services. The hit man arrived promptly and she bade him take the girl out into the forest and dispatch her.

Snohomish Quantrill was the daughter's name. She had been named for the town that had given her father his acting debut on nationwide television. Her father had legally assumed the name Raydir Quantrill to fit his rebellious onstage image, but he was only rebellious for show. His real name was Raymond Kinsale and offstage be was fairly conventional, for a rock star/actor. Too much sex, drugs and rock and roll and not enough tune for his kid.

Sno felt sharply again just now little time he did have for her when a complete stranger picked her up from school that day. Of course, even if he'd been her dad himself, she probably wouldn't have recognized him* all decked out in full biker leathers, a helmet and goggles. But he had the authorization letter the school required of any staff member her dad sent to pick her up, so she figured it was safe to go with him, even if he did look a lot like Darth Vader. He was probably a new guy or someone who'd been off on Jhe road taking care of stuff for her dad. She hadn't been living with Raydir all that long this time, and his staff tended to have a pretty big turnover.

This was the first time anyone had ever picked her up on a Harley-Davidson, though! Usually Raydir just sent the limo. She got on behind the guy and jammed her head into the helmet he tossed at her. Hitching her school skirt up to her crotch, she hung on for dear life as he roared out of the parking lot. But she was not amused. This was not her idea of a great way to ride home. For one thing, it was December and she had only the unlined red wool parka her private school allowed as an overcoat with the uniform--anything to squash her individuality. Little did they know about the love beads lurking beneath her prissy white blouse. But the uniform, blouse, skirt, sweater and parka, was not made for riding bikes in midwinter.

Not only was it cold, but she quailed at having to cuddle up to a strange guy even for the time it took to ride the few blocks to the mansion. She was thirteen now, and looked older, even in the stupid school uniform, not mat it mattered how old she was to some of the pervs Raydir hung out with. Even when she was a little kid, back when she and Mom used to live with Raydir on the road, she'd learned to be quick and smart about who she was alone with in a hotel room or on the bus. Her mom had warned her against certain guys, even back when she was four or five, but she was too little to be able to always duck them and her mom couldn't always be there. That's why she and Suzanne-- Mom--had left Raydir the first time.

That and the bimbos. For the last three years they'd lived with Grandma Hilda in Missouri. It wasn't-exactly The Cosby Show, just the three of mem and Mom's boyfriends and Grandma's art students hanging around after the beauty parlor closed for the day. And Grandma Hilda had a great vinyl LP collection of sixties oldies, which was how Sno had come to know and love her favorite music, music that had stories and melodies and rhythms that had nothing to do with Raydir's kind of music.

She had her eyes closed and her cheek pressed against the impersonal leather back of the driver. The wind bit through her tights and ran right up her skirt, and shivers raced across her shoulders despite the red parka. The wind was too strong for her to be able to keep the hood around her face.

Surely they ought to be home by now. But suddenly, even through the Harley's roar, the traffic noise changed and she saw that they were headed onto the on-ramp to 1-5 headed north.

She tugged the dude's jacket "Hey," she hollered. "We're going the wrong way."

"Party," he screamed back at her.

Oh, yeah, that was right. Raydir had said something about a party. She had just assumed she wouldn't be going. Well, damn, if she'd known, she'd have brought something to change into. Raydir didn't think of little details like that and it was just like Gerardine, her stepmother, to be sure that Sno arrived in her dorky red school uniform for the party. Not mat she cared about most of Raydir's parties, or about fitting into the self-consciously hip crowd that attended them. They weren't all that much fun, in her opinion.

Raydir and all his friends thought they were so cool, so with it, but Sno was unimpressed. She was heavily into retro. While Mom was out on dates, Sno and Grandma used to make brownies and listen to the music, and Grandma would look deeply into the bowl of brownie batter and sigh, and after a while get out her protest buttons and tell Sno about the marches she had been on. So Sno loved more than the music; she was into the whole thing, the activism, the clothes, the marches, the--whatchamacallit--ambi-ahnce. She couldn't wait for beUrbottoms to come back. Fortunately for her, her hair was long, naturally straight and black, like Joan Baez's on her old album covers, so she had always kind of had a sixties look too. Raydir had sneered at such an unhip kid. Back before they left him for good, Mom had tried to please him by cutting Sno's hair a couple of times into a Mohawk and putting pink and purple stripes in it Thank God that look was totally out now.

But Sno would have put up with it all over again if it meant having Mom back. The wind stung her face and whipped away the tears that otherwise would have trickled onto the leather jacket Shit shit shit shit shit

She was half afraid, riding in the open on the Harley, and halfway she just wished they'd hit something and she'd go flying until she crashed hard enough to stop the pain for good.

At least the wind and cold were numbing her now, and they had just exited toward Mount Baker. The mountains looked great today, clear and crisp with their new coat of snow, like humongous scoops of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles where the snow hadn't stuck yet

And they were getting close. Closer all the time. This party was really off in the boonies. True, a lot of the rich people lived out toward the mountains, but mostly they didn't expect people to come to their parties after it started snowing and the roads got icy. Nevertheless, the bike roared farther and farther from the interstate, and, as the road sloped upward toward the mountains, and the sky grew darker, it grew colder and colder. Sno clung even tighter to the driver, small against his broad black leather back.

Even as she cowered against the wind, the nervous feeling that had been pawing at her gut sharpened into panic. None of this made any sense. Maybe the guy had been sent to get her. Maybe there was a party. But now that she thought about it, hadn't Raydir mentioned something about Kirkland? And Kirkland was just a little north of Seattle, not all the way up here.

Who way this guy? How had he gotten the authorization letter? Oh, crap.

Up a disused road, he ran the bike onto a trail in the woods. A trail. Not a driveway. And the woods didn't hide any big elegant houses with BMWs out front. He had to slow a little, and she thought maybe she could jump off and run away, but if she fell and hurt herself she'd have no defense against him at all.

Finally, he stopped and dismounted, kicking her shin as he scooted off the bike without paying any attention to her, seated behind him. Then, before she could hop off and run, he grabbed her wrist in one hand and jerked her off the bike. With the other hand, he reached into his leathers and pulled out a knife, which he flicked to reveal a long, glittering blade.

IN AN EARLIER time in another part of the state in a village sandwiched between the sea and the forest there once lived a poor woodsman and his. wife with their two children. Since the goddamned ecologists and their goddamned spotted owls had closed the forests, the woodsman no longer had any wood to cut to earn his living and his company had laid him off. For a time, he and his family subsisted on unemployment compensation, but as the program had been axed by the state during budget cuts, soon that means of providing food for the table also ran out.

"Let's go to the city where I can find work in my former employment as a topless dancer," the wife urged, but the woodsman would not hear of it. He had married his wife to take her away from all that, and besides, he didn't like the city. But all the jobs in their hometown were taken by other people who were out of work and their families, and soon it seemed that following his wife's plan was the only thing the woodsman could do.

At first the woodsman's children were not unhappy at the thought of moving. "Oh boy! Sevenplex movie theaters!" little Hank cried with glee.

"Chucky Cheeses, Chucky Cheeses," said his sister Gigi, who was only four but remembered birthday treats at the children's restaurant with all of the big mechanical and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches right there on the menu.

"Not unless your old man finds another job, kids," their father told them. "It'll be slim pickin's otherwise."

But their mother, who had to listen to them cry when they left behind most of their toys at the yard sale the family had before moving in with their mother's sister in Seattle, was more encouraging. "Yeah, sure, it'll be great. We'll go to the zoo and the aquarium and the children's theater at Seattle Center. Okay, Gigi, Chucky Cheeses too. But you kids gotta be real good. Don't give your Aunt Bambi any grief. She works nights and sleeps during the day and prob'ly Mommy will too so you got to be real quiet and real good while we're there, okay?"

The children promised that they would. Hank, who was seven, was aware that his parents were troubled and his daddy particularly was very sad. His daddy loved the woods, even though he chopped them down for a living.

"Maybe I can get out on a fishing boat," Daddy had said. "Let me give it a shot, honey. I don't want you back in one of them places."

His mother had smiled and stood real close to his daddy, like she was going to kiss him. "Those places aren't all that bad now, baby. That's where we met, 'member?"

And so the family moved to the city, where they all slept in the living room in Aunt Bambi's apartment.

It was summer when they moved there, and Hank hoped that his father would soon get a job fishing. Maybe then he would take Hank with him. Hank had always enjoyed fishing with his father when they lived in the village. And indeed, every day while Aunt Bambi and Mama slept and Gigi played quietly alone, Father took the #17 bus from downtown Seattle to the Ballard Locks to look for work, and every night he came home as Aunt Bambi went to work and Mama went to seek work.

When he had been a woodsman, Father's homecoming was always a happy time of day, but when he came home from the Locks he was always sad and angry--and he smelled like beer. At first he was just mad at the ecolo-gists and the owls and the company that laid him off and the goddamn politicians. Then he started getting mad at Mama.

"Hank needs lunch money for school/* Mama told him.

"Where do you think I'd get lunch money?" Father asked. "You were the one who was going to get a job. Nobody in port is taking on unskilled hands right now."

"I'm trying, honey, but I've gotten a little old, you know, and--"

"Put on a little weight, haven't you? Too porky for the clubs anymore?"

"I haven't gained mat much!"

"Don't worry about it, baby, 'cause if one of us doesn't get a job pretty soon we're gonna be starving and you'll get skinny enough then."

"What do you mean, gonna?" Mama demanded. Hank didn't want to hear them yell at each other, and Gigi just stared at them with her eyes great big, looking like she was going to bawl. Hank shook his bead at her not to. "There's no 'gonna' to it. Matt. While you drink up what little bit we've got left, Gigi and me are eating one meal a day and that's pancakes! God, I'm sick of pancakes. Hank gets his meal at school, but if you don't give him the money, he doesn't eat."

"What happened to free school lunches?"

"They went out when the administration changed, you know that. Your buddy, the governor who was going to make the woods safe for industry again, decided that there shouldn't be any free lunches for the kids of people who were too lazy to work. Like us."

"Don't you get snotty with me!" he yelled and looked like he was going to hit her.

Aunt Bambi slumped out of her bedroom then, wearing just a T-shirt with a pair of titties on the front of it. "Hey, you two. Knock it off or find someplace else to crash. I need my rest, y'know?"

The next night Father didn't come home.

"Hank, I want you to look after your little sister while Aunt Bambi and I are gone," Mama said. "Just go to bed and don't open the door for anyone."

"Not even Daddy?' Gigi asked. "Where1 s Daddy?'

"You heard me," Mama said. "He can sleep it off in the gutter if he wants to. Tonight's amateur night at the club, and I think the boss has his eye on me. If-1 do good, things'll be better around here for a while."

"Where's Daddy?" Gigi demanded.

Mama let out a deep sigh and set down her purse to pick up Gigi. "Daddy's gone right now, sweetie. Maybe he found a boat to work on, eh? But I'll tell you what. If the nice man at Aunt Bambi's friend's work likes Mama's dancing, there'll be money again. We could go to Chucky Cheeses maybe to celebrate. Would you like that?"

Gigi nodded gravely, but after Mama left, she cried again for Daddy.

Daddy didn't find a boat after all, and two nights later he came home. His beard was grown out and scratchy and his breath smelled bad. Hank had to let him in, because Mama and Aunt Bambi were gone then.

"Hi, kids. Hiya, Gigi," he said in a slurry voice. "How's my little princess?"

Gigi started to cry.

"Aw, shut that shit up, baby," he groaned, and when she just cried louder he screamed at her and for a minute Hank thought he was going to hit her. Hank ran over to her and put his hand over her mouth.

"She'll be okay, Daddy. She's just kind of hungry. Mama didn't have time to make her pancakes and I don't know how. Maybe you could show me?"

"What the hell do I know about that? Cooking's your mama's job, not whorin' around all night."

"She's got a job--I think," Hank said. "She said she would bring home money."

"Well, that's something," Daddy said.

And for a few days there was money, but there never was enough to go to Chucky Cheeses, and Daddy always needed some to go to the Locks. Then one night Mama came home in the middle of the night, crying.

A few minutes later, Aunt Bambi came in too, and she was mad. "What the hell are you making such a fuss for? You know if you break the rules you get fined. You don't touch the customers. It's the law, Candy."

"That was a hundred-dollar bill, sis. A hundred dollars. Do you know what we could do with a hundred dollars?"

"Yeah, sure. Your old man could drink it all up in two days instead of one. Look, you're ray sister and I love you, but I can't support all of us. The boss wants you to do that little favor for him. If you do it, he'll forget the fine."

"I don't traffic in drugs," Mom said coldly. "It's the law, sis. I'd get busted and I'd lose my kids."

"Fine. Great. We're going nowhere here. You'd be better off without these kids and they'd be better off without you the way you're going. And the sooner you lose that husband of yours, the better off you'll all be."

Mama cried and hugged them and said she loved her family, but things got worse after that. Daddy said he was taking a boat to Alaska and wouldn't tell Mama where be was going or when he was coming home. Mama cried all the time and went out every night and left them alone.

Then for a little while there was money, and Mama laughed more and bought some clothes and makeup and stuff and once took them out to Chucky Cheeses again. But then one morning a man brought her home and she was laughing like crazy and smelled funny.

The man didn't like Hank and Gigi, they could tell. And he came home with Mama a lot. Mama was almost never home then, and Aunt Bambi yelled at the children whenever she was awake. Mama had no appetite when she was home and no longer cooked for Hank and Gigi. When Hank tried to make pancakes, he made such a mess that Aunt Bambi hit him, and when Mama came home she hit him too.

After that, she cried and said she was sorry and soon they would have their own place and everything would be better. But Gigi started crying for Daddy, and Mama got mad again.

The man brought her home the next morning, and this time she looked half mad, half sad, the way Daddy used to. Or that was what Hank thought, anyway. Then all of a sudden she got happy and said, "Instead of sleeping today, I'm going to take you to the mall. How would that be?"

They were very excited about going to the mall. They left Aunt Bambi's apartment, in a development where all of the apartments looked alike, and took a bus--not the #17, but another bus. They changed buses many times so that it took a long time to reach the mall, and Hank tried to memorize all the bus numbers, but it was too confusing. Finally, they arrived at the mall. They had only been to one mall before, but this one was bigger, with lots and lots of stores.

There were benches where you could sit too, and although Gigi and Hank wanted so much to find out where the tantalizing aroma of chocolate chip cookies was coming from, Mama wanted to try on underwear at an underwear store. "You kids sit out here and wait for me," she said. 'I'll just be a minute."

But lots of minutes passed and Mama didn't come back. Hank told Gigi to sit very still and be very good while he went in to find Mama. He thought maybe she'd yell at him, but he figured at least she'd be there. She wasn't. The lady at the store said she'd gone to try something on and hadn't come back. There was nobody in the dressing rooms either. The lady looked. She said there was an employees' exit in the back of the store and maybe Mama had gone to check the car. But there was no car.

Hank ran out to find Gigi, but she was gone too. He searched and searched, frantic to find either his mama or his sister, and then he saw the top of his sister's little blonde head and the flash of her Ninja Turtles sweatshirt. She was running like crazy right toward him, her fists full of something.

"Gigi, where've you been? Whatcha got?"

"Cookies, Hank. Have one!" she said, and gave him crumbled bits of cookie.

"How'd you get 'em?" Hank asked her, for neither of them had any money.

"They were just sitting on a counter," Gigi said. "And I was hungry, so I took one."

"Gigi, you can't just rip off cookies," Hank said. "You've gotta pay for them."

"That's right, little boy," a menacing voice said from behind him. "You have to pay."

ROSE ALWAYS FOUND it remarkable that considering there were only about half a million people in the commercial city limits and twice that in all of King County, it seemed like there were, to paraphrase an old TV show, eight million hard-luck stories in the Emerald City. More per capita, anyway, than seemed possible from the population. Naturally, she knew that there were plenty of comparatively sane, conscientious and caring people in the city. There was always some group from Seattle going to build Peace Parks or help with relief to some embattled third-world country. Seattleites marched the streets in force against war and injustice, and a few of the wealthy descendants of pioneers actually put their money where their mouths were to improve the city both environmentally and culturally. The few shelters and soup kitchens remaining could not have stayed open except for the volunteers, caring people all.

Unfortunately, with her increased caseload and the longer hours she was working these days, Rose was usually too tired by the time she got off work to see any of her "civilian" friends, except for Linden.

Every morning she got up by six-thirty to dress, drive to the ferry terminal and make the hour-long ferry commute cross-Sound from Bremerton to Seattle. Then she usually worked a ten- to twelve-hour day before making the same trip in reverse. Day in and day out she listened to tales of murder, drug traffic, child molesting, battery and rape, not to mention the simple economic tragedies that cast people onto the streets.

Most of the time all she could do was listen and fill out endless reams of paperwork, or coach the clients to fill out endless reams of paperwork. Usually both. She used to be able to help people make the system work for them, but these days the system was getting its revenge, drowning everyone in fruitless paperwork.

Dialogues at work were sounding more and more like scripts from a black comedy.

"A foster home is not an appropriate placement at this time. Rose," Mrs. Hager said, handing back the stack of paperwork Rose had spent hours filling out. "Not when the child's father has become available to care for her."

"But the father's only available because he's out on parole for child abuse and molesting her older sister!" Rose protested.

"And you must remember that he is on parole," the supervisor told her. "Society considers that he is no longer a risk."

"You mean the sister moved to another state with no forwarding address so she can't protest the parole," Rose said, firmly damping down the desire to scream at the woman.

"Now, Rose, you don't know that," Hager said.

Rose wanted to shout, well, you would, you stupid cow, if you knew beans about your job, but she knew it would cost her her own job. Mrs. Melvin Hager was not one to tolerate even gentle criticism of her actions and zealously guarded her prerogatives at all times. Rose and her colleagues were not sure where Mrs. Hager had gotten her degree in psychiatric social work; the most popular supposition was that she had mail-ordered it from the Sears catalog back in the days when there still was a Sears catalog, but Rose was inclined to side with those who held that someone who dressed like Hager wouldn't have been caught dead shopping at Sears, even by mail, and the degree had to have come from Bloomingdale's at least

Rose would have risked her job, if she thought it would do any good, but if she did, then Hager and the newly appointed division chief would just hire someone as wildly unqualified as Hager to take over. Then where would clients like little Polly Reynaud be? in the same place, actually, but without anybody watching over the situation who gave a damn or who would believe Polly when she tried to tell them about the games Daddy liked to play.

"How about if Polly stays with these people until the father is established in a counseling program here?" Rose asked. "Polly's been with these people for three years now, and she thinks of mem as her parents. It would be traumatic to..."

"Just my point, Rose," Mrs. Hager said. "The child has begun to bond with others than her own family. All the more reason why she should be reunited with her father as soon as possible. Remember what the governor promised the people. This is a state agency which provides family services. We are responsible to and for the family and should at all times give the sanctity and sovereignty of the family unit the highest priority."

"Even when the family is a piranha like Reynaud?" Rose asked.

Mrs. Hager smiled a tight little smile. "It will all work itself out, Rose. Polly is herself a Reynaud, after all."

Rose didn't even ask what that was supposed to mean, but she was pretty sure it meant that if Reynaud was a daddy piranha, men Polly was a baby piranha and would learn to take care of herself. That was the way La Hager's mind worked. Rose picked up her report and left Hager's office, managing to close the door quietly instead of running screaming, tearing her hair and rending her clothing and engaging in other such elaborately inappropriate behavior, which might convey the wrong impression. Or not.

By then it was time for the department to close, though Rose still had a long night ahead of her, on call. Since she lived 'cross Sound in Bremerton, she had to stay the night on a cot set up in one of the interview rooms so she'd be available.

Her desk was covered with little yellow Post-its of calls received needing to be answered. She glanced through them, thinking that returning a few quick phone calls would make the time pass more quickly.

Of the business calls, none could be dealt with until Monday, but there was one personal message, and Rose picked up the slip with pleasure. "Call Lucinda Ellis," it said. "Lucky Shoe Stables, 547-8456." She dialed the phone quickly, before it could ring bringing another problem. It rang several times before a somewhat breathless voice on the other end said, "Lucky Shoe Stables, Lucinda here."

"Cindy? It's Rose."

"Oh, Rose! Good to hear from you. How's it going?"

"Busy but okay. How about with you? Are you enjoying the new job?"

"I'd enjoy anything that got me away from the bosoms of my loving family," Cindy said. "I'm house-sitting for a woman the owner of the stable knows, watching her cat and dog, and I'm teaching classes as well as exercising the horses. It doesn't pay much, but it keeps me alive since Paola threw me out of the house while she was contesting Dad's will. She keeps calling up, talking to the owner and trying to get me fired. Fortunately, the owner has a lot of horse sense, which is more than you can say for Paola."

"I thought surely she'd leave you alone once she took possession of the house your father left her."

"In my dreams. No, even though her lawyers got her and Pam and Perdita all of Dad's estate except the trust fund he set up for me, she's out to get that too and has it frozen while she's fighting it and meanwhile is making all the trouble for me she can."

"Oh, Cindy! That miserable bitch!"

"That's not the half of it. Wait till you hear the grounds she's using to contest the will..." They talked for several more minutes and finally Cindy ended with, "So what I wanted really, Rose, was to invite you up for a ride while I've still got the job."

"I'm not a very good rider."

"It's okay. We board some lovely thoroughbreds, and I'm teaching their owners to jump, but a lot of our business is just saddling up quarter horses with western tack for people who want to mosey around the park. Please say you'll come. I want to do something for you to thank you for all your help in getting away from Paola and company."

"Cindy, that is so sweet. And I'd love to come. I haven't been riding in a long time. Give me directions again."

The mall security guard had been really mad at Gigi for stealing the cookies, though when Hank tried to return the handful of cookie crumbs, slightly moist from being clutched in Gigi's hand, the man didn't seem to want them. He just wanted to yell.

"Is he going to put us in jail?" Gigi asked Hank hi a whisper, not scared, just morbidly interested.

The man had taken them. Hank by his right hand, Gigi by her left, and hauled them back into the secret offices

in the mall, where there was nothing pretty to look at and only metal furniture, and sat them down in chairs.

"Now then, what are your names?" he asked Hank, and Hank told him, even though he was afraid.

"You, young man, you're old enough to have memorized your address and phone number."

But Hank just shook his head. Aunt Bambi wouldn't let anyone use her phone but her, and no one had ever told Hank what the number was.

He told the man they lived in an apartment with his mother and his aunt and that Mama had left them at the mall.

"Well, then," the man said, and made a phone call. Some time later a policeman arrived. He wore a brown uniform and a windbreaker and had a clipboard and something stuffed under his arm.

"Now you're in for it," Hank hissed to his sister. 'That cop's going to get us 'cause you stole the cookie."

"These* re the culprits," the security guard said. "Cookie thieves."

"Cookie thieves?" the cop asked. Then, hunkering down in front of Hank and Gigi, he asked in a whisper, "How are the cookies here? Any good?"

Gigi stuck her thumb in her mouth, the way she did - more and more often anymore, but Hank shrugged and said, "They're okay."

"Did you get enough? You still hungry?"

Hank nodded.

"Boy, me too. I missed my dinner. You kids want to come have a Big Mac and fries with me? My treat." But when he stood up and reached for their hands, Gigi began to scream. Hank realized she knew that the cop was just saying he was going to take them for a Big Mac to get them to come to jail without a fight. He crossed his arms and glared at the cop to let him know he wasn't going to be fooled that easily.

The cop hunkered down again with an exasperated sigh and rolled his eyes at the security man. Then, from under his arm, he drew out something furry and looked at it as if it had come there all by itself. It was a teddy bear dressed in a policeman's uniform. Talking to the bear just like Hank used to talk to GI Joe and Gigi talked to her own stuffed kitty, left behind in Forks, the cop said, "Officer Bear, I think you'd better take over this investigation. See, the thing is, these kids have lost their mama and they're tired and hungry but they're kinda scared of me. Do you mink you could tell them I'm okay?"

He waggled the bear up and down and turned it to face them. "Hiya, kids. I'm Officer Bear but you can call me Fuzz."

Gigi scooted forward a little bit, the tears stopping, though the thumb didn't come out of her mouth.

Hank looked at the cop. "I know it*s really you talking," he said.

The cop winked at him but Officer Bear wagged into his face. "What's your namer

"Hank. This is my sister Gigi. She's four."

"What grade're you in, Hank?"

"First."

"Do you like it?"

Hank nodded. "Most of the time."

"Me too. Most of the time school's cool. I had to go to police academy before I joined the force, of course, and that was lots of fun but what I really want is a real boy or girl of my own to go to preschool and kindygarden with, to color and count and learn the ABCs."

With this the cop turned Fuzz to Gigi and pushed the bear up against her arm. At first she drew back, but when the bear snuggled her arm, the thumb popped out of her mouth and she grabbed the bear with both arms. , The cop winked at Hank again. "I lose more good partners that way."

"Will you really take us for a hamburger and not put us in jail?" Hank asked.

'Tm just going to try to help you, son. Cops do lots more than put people in jail, you know. Ever see Rescue 911?"

Hank shook his head and the cop muttered, "Well, that blows that approach," under his breath.

"You got a gun?" Hank asked.

"Yeah, and handcuffs too. Wanna see them?"

"Can I?" Hank asked, and the cop--his name was Officer Fred--showed him the cuffs and even let him carry mem when he and Gigi and the bear went to McDonald's. They had Big Deal Meals that came with free dinosaurs, and meanwhile they talked with Officer Fred about the mall. He had a little nephew, he said, and he wondered if this was a good mall to come to to buy him a present. He wondered if their folks brought them here real often and if it was near their house.

Hank told him that it wasn't, that their real home was by the ocean but they couldn't live there anymore because Daddy'd lost his job.

"Gee, that's tough," Officer Fred said. "What job did he have?"

Then he wanted to know about Mama and finally asked which store Mama had gone into when she disappeared. Hank showed him and Officer Fred spoke to the saleslady for a minute, then asked Gigi and Hank if they wanted to ride in the squad car and help him make a call on his police radio phone.

As they drove farther along on the freeway, there was a traffic jam and as it ended; Officer Fred showed them how the lights worked. Then he used the phone again and at last turned in to a parking space in front of a building with a green awning over the front and a sign that read AURORA CENTER. Two windows on the second floor were lit.

"Department of Family Services, Rose Samson speaking." Rose answered the phone with mingled dread and relief. Dread because you never knew what catastrophe might be on the other end, and relief because almost anything would be better than the boredom of staying in the office all night waiting for something to happen.

"Rosie! Hi. It's Fred Moran, remember me?"

Rose grinned into the phone, she was so pleased to hear hear the familiar name. "Fred! How've you been? Haven't seen you in a long time." Fred Moran had been the security officer at the department during the six years he was studying criminology, justice, psychology, sociology and urban anthropology at the university so he could be the best-prepared cop on the force. He came from a long line of Irish police, including his mother, but as a security guard at least, he had had nothing of the cynical macho bully often associated with a badge. Even with privately hired guards, some clinics were stuck with the stereotypical "cop" behavior around damaged, sometimes rebellious, sometimes hostile clients who had been or felt they had been shafted by the system. The guard Aurora had had before was one of that kind, and had to quit when one of the clients put nun in the hospital with a broken neck.

Rose had been doing interviews with new clients when Benny Jackson, who had a drinking problem and an attitude, came in. Before he had been there a minute, he started swearing that be wasn't about to wait in line again.

One of the other counselors--there had been an office full back then--shrugged and grimaced in response to Benny's griping. And Rose had braced herself inwardly for an explosion when she saw the new guard approach Benny.

But instead of challenging the man. Fred had asked in an amiable way, "You running into some kinda problem berer

And Benny had growled something and Fred said, "Well, let me see if I can give you a hand. Computers have been acting up today and things have been going sort of slow but..." And be continued to sort out Benny's problem in a way that was not just polite, but seemed as if he gave a damn.

He was like that with all the clients. "I really hate it mat our security guard isn't on the state payroll," her boss back then said. "That guy goes above and beyond the call of duty all the time--he does case management and he gets paid minimum wage with no paid vacation or sick leave."

Friendly and personable as he was, Fred had listened more than he talked, and Rose hadn't realized he was leaving them until he'd showed up one day in his Sheriff's Department uniform and announced he had graduated from school and was ready for the streets.

This call was the first she'd heard from him since.

"Oh, you know how it is with us King County cops. We migrate all over the place for a while, learning the territory. I've been working the north end lately so I haven't been down your way much, but I'll be working out of the courthouse starting this weekend so I'll probably get to drop by once in a while."

"We'd love to see you," she said.

"Great. You'll have to show me all the good new places to have lunch downtown and fill me in on what's happening."

"Any time," she said, smiling into the receiver. She regretted that they hadn't become better friends while he was there. It would be terrific if that was still possible. For one thing, he was a pretty cute guy, although she seemed to remember he had been living with someone or something at one time.

He was continuing. "Listen, I've got a couple of youngsters with me I think need to meet you. Seems their mother took them to the mall and then got lost for the rest of the night. The place is closed now and still no sign of mother. The family moved recently too, and the kids can't remember the address."

Rose said nothing. What was there to say? If the children's own home could be found, they'd have to go back there as soon as possible even though an investigation should be launched, by all rights. Under the new system, children were always returned to their families first. "The family unit is also innocent until proved guilty," Hager was fond of saying. Nevertheless, Rose called around and looked into emergency foster placements and was pleased to learn that the Ogdens, a couple who had four kids of their own and a constant stream of foster children, were ready to shuffle their house around to make room for the children that night.

She heard the opening front door of the otherwise silent building and footsteps on the stairs--an adult's quick, deliberate steps accompanied by what sounded like a herd of children, and there they were.

"Hi, Rose, this is Hank and Gigi," Fred said. God, the new uniform was ever so much more becoming than the old one! But otherwise he looked much the same, his face neither handsome nor homely, his dark hair already streaked with gray, his hazel eyes intelligent and understanding. And his smile was the same old brilliant smile, broadening when he saw her. She was glad to see that the streets hadn't taken that out of him yet Although, actually, if working here

THE GODMOTHER

hadn't done it, nothing was likely to.

The kids were a small boy who might have been anywhere from five to eight years old and a little girl three or four. The boy's hair was sandy blond and his face rather thin and nervous, his blue eyes darting everywhere, taking in the office, and back up to Fred's face for reassurance. The girl's white-blonde hair curled in little wisps at her shoulders and in bangs she kept brushing from her eyes with one hand, while in the other she clutched a teddy bear dressed as a policeman.

Rose hunkered down until she was eye level with the kids. "Hi, who's your friend?' she asked the little girl.

"Fuzz," she said loudly, then, as if startled by her own voice, stuck the thumb of her free hand in her mouth.

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"He's a great bear. Where'd you get him?"

She looked up at Fred with big blue eyes. Rose's own eyes followed hers, and she smiled up at Fred too. She knelt beside Gigi and fingered one of the bear's paws. Fred's hands were long and well shaped, she noticed, the fingers slightly broader at the nails. "Officer Bear here is assisting us with our enquiries, isn't he, kids?"

Thumb still in her mouth, Gigi nodded gravely. Hank asked suddenly, "Will you call our dad in Alaska?"

"Oh?" Rose asked. "Is your dad in Alaska? What's his name?"

"Harry Bjornsen," the boy said promptly. "I'm Harry Bjornsen, Jr., really, but Dad doesn't like junior so I'm Hank."

Fred was nodding in a pleased way. "I'd rather be called Hank than Junior myself. Do you know which boat your dad's on?"

"Naw, he didn't tell us," Hank said. "Aunt Bambi says he isn't coming back."

"Who's Aunt Bambi?" Rose asked.

"We live with her," Hank said.

"What's her last name?"

Hank shrugged. "Just Bambi, I guess."

While she was questioning them, Fred said, "I'm going to go see what I can find. See you, Rosie."

"Okay," she said, and waved good-bye, as did the children, as he headed for the stairs.

She picked up her beeper then and drove Hank and Gigi to the Ogden house, where they were bedded down for the night while Fred initiated the search for their mother. Unfortunately for the kids, he was a very good detective.

Hank and Gigi went with Rose to Mr. and Mrs. Ogden's house where Mrs. Ogden gave them their own brand-new toothbrushes and pajamas and had her kids, two boys, move in together so Hank and Gigi could have one of their rooms. The kids didn't even seem to mind. They were already in bed by the time Hank and Gigi got there and seemed too sleepy to object.

And the-next morning, there was Officer Fred at the lady's door.'"Ready .to go home?" he asked diem, and took them straight back to Aunt Bambi's.

Mama looked really glad to see them and hugged and kissed them and admired Officer Fuzz and tried to thank Officer Fred but when he looked at her, he looked just the way Hank had been afraid policemen would look.

Aunt Bambi .woke up after Officer Fred left, padded out into the kitchenette for a beer, took one look at them and said to Mama, "Shit. You're going to have to do better next time."

THE FERRY GLIDED across Puget Sound trapped between two slices of brilliant blue, the sky and the water, with the snowy peaks of the Olympic Mountains behind, the Cascades ahead, the sharp white peak of Mount Baker up north beyond the San Juan Islands, the perfect cone of Mount Rainier to the south. It was one of those days that appeared on postcards that lured more and more tourists and transplants to Seattle. But, as was often true of such eye-appealing days, it was bitter cold, so Rose enjoyed the scenery from inside the ferry, warming her hands and her throat with a cup of cappuccino from the ferry's espresso bar while she listened to two musicians, Tania and Mark, play Irish tunes on a variety of instruments.

Rose didn't often get to hear the ferryboat musicians, since they only played the Bainbridge Island-Seattle route, and she normally rode the Bremerton ferry. But this morning, as sometimes happened, one of the Bremerton ferries had mechanical problems and wasn't running. It had taken her three hours to get home instead of just one. On the way over, she'd had no choice, since her car was still parked at me ferry terminal in Bremerton, but she chose to take the more reliable Bainbridge ferry on the way back. It took twenty minutes longer to drive to it from her house, but the trip across was only a half-hour instead of an hour.

Besides, this way she could see the musicians.

Had she known the trip home would be such an ordeal, she'd have arranged to have her cats fed and just stayed in Seattle to go to Linden's and then riding with Cindy. But she hadn't arranged for the cats and hadn't brought riding clothes, and Linden didn't open till eleven and Rose's shift was over at seven, so there should have been lots of time.

After dropping Hank and Gigi at the Ogdens', she had been able to sleep through the rest of the night in the clinic, then called in and reported off to Hager, who was taking call the rest of the weekend. Since Hager lived in Seattle, she needed only to carry a beeper. Normally, Rose would have had scads of time to get home, feed the cats, shower, change, and catch up on mail and phone calls, but because of the delay in the ferries she had had to rush. So now she enjoyed kicking back and letting the music refresh her.

Although soliciting on the ferries was strictly against the rules, only one or two of the more hidebound captains, afraid that the boats would become an extension of the panhandling street life in the city, prevented the musicians from playing. The passengers enjoyed the diversion. The music was usually instrumental--a harpist, a couple who played mainly Scandinavian music on accordion and mandolin, and Tania and Mark, who played fiddle, guitar, harp and hammered dulcimer, and sometimes other exotic instruments.

"Now docking Seattle," a voice on the intercom announced about ten minutes from the dock. On the left was the cityscape, the Space Needle, the Smith Tower which had once been the tallest building in the country, the modern skyscrapers mingling with the art deco remnants of another, kinder, gentler generation, the big E of the Edgewater Inn and the sign for Pike Place Public Mar-ket. Stretching along the waterfront to the right were the old wharfs now gentrified into gift shops full of jewelry. T-shirts, shell lamps, fudge, Mount St Helens glassware, gourmet chocolates, Indian crafts and exotic imports, all of which could be reached by a walkway studded with seafood restaurants, and hung with brightly colored banners. Horse-drawn carriages lined the water side of the Alaska Way, waiting forlornly for the tourists who were not out on such a cold day. The trolley tracks sat empty under the Highway 99 viaduct, and beyond them cars prowled in the shade of the viaduct, searching for parking places. Rose was glad her office was right downtown and jshe seldom had to drive in Seattle. The traffic getting off the ferry was particularly bad, being routed far to the south, toward the Kingdome.

Along the waterfront, a shoal of giant orange cranes loaded and unloaded barges like so many spindly spiders storing food for the winter.

Hie ferry docked. Rose dropped a dollar in Tania's guitar case and followed the teal-and-purple parka ahead of her down the causeway and out onto the sidewalk outside the ferry terminal, across the tunnel walkway that ran under the viaduct and over Alaska Way, spilling ferry passengers out onto First and Marion.

One youngish boy Rose didn't know sat listlessly against the side of the tunnel, while on the other side a bearded, red-faced man in his forties or fifties greeted each passerby with a pleasant remark followed, if they waited long enough, with a request for change. The guy was a vet, and she wasn't sure what his trip was, but at least it didn't seem to be hostile.

She caught a bus up First to Third and Pine and walked over to Nordstrom's to buy a new pair of walking shoes before heading to the Market, past the Bon and the deserted Frederick's and Nelson building, and by the scrumptious shops of Westlake Plaza. The usual steel drum band entertained people lunching at the patio tables set on the ornamental brick-and-concrete work that blocked off the street as a strictly pedestrian area. A street preacher was exhorting shoppers about the love of God. She happened to know this particular proselytizer, from her former position as a counselor at the Seattle women's shelter. She felt like getting up and doing a little preaching herself about people who claimed to be religious and did to their wives what this guy had done in the name of morality. She kept walking.

The Pet Man, one of Patrick's clients, sat on the next corner, his two lovable mutts and the gray striped cat sitting beside him, his battered hat with a few coins and a dollar or two next to him. A young woman in a skirt printed like an Indian bedspread dropped a bag of dry cat food into the hat and passed on. The Pet Man said nothing to her, but one of the dogs sniffed the bag. Rose didn't think the dog could be too interested. She knew how well fed these animals were.

The Pet Man's menagerie was among the animals Linden cared for from time to time. She licensed all of the pets she cared for. Once the Pet Man had disappeared for six months, and the Humane Society in Spokane had called Linden because her name was on a dog's tag. Linden had the dog flown back to her, but when the Pet Man returned, he had avoided her for months, not wanting to tell her he'd lost the dog.

As she neared the market, Rose beard the competing musics of the street musicians who worked every available comer, doorway and level of the area. The clapping gospel music of Gasworks Gus, an older black man, and three young recently acquired proteges, the new washboard band with the blonde woman and her guitar-playing partner, all aggressively competed against by one of the crewcut, orange-overalled Accordions From Hell group who seemed bound and determined to drown out other street music. She glanced in the window of the ice cream store, where Linden's songwriter friend Merle usually spent all day with his dog Pal at his feet, a guitar on his lap, a notepad, pencil, and a cup of coffee with endless refills on the table while he wrote songs. He wasn't there today.

She looked across the street, under the canopy of the market proper, where vendors sold fish and honey, flowers and tie-dyed T-shirts, rubber stamps and handmade silver jewelry. She would cross at First and Pike, she thought.

"Rose," someone said at her elbow. "Rose, it's me. Rose, please, have you got a couple of dollars? Fm really hungry."

The voice was male and young and did not yet have a good street whine to it It sounded scared. And the face was familiar.

"Dico?" she asked, looking under the grime to the chocolate-brown skin beneath.

"Yeah."

"What did you do? Run out on the foster home?"

"What foster home? I've been on the streets since I turned eighteen."

"But I found you a placement..."

"Yeah, well, not fast enough. And I'd look for a job, honest, Rose, only I got no place to clean up, you know? I sure don't want to use the shower at the shelter. How about it? Couple of bucks for a snack?"

She took a five from her purse. Dico Miller wasn't a bad kid, wasn't on drugs or anything else that she knew of, and he did look thin. His parents had both been killed in an accident and hadn't left enough to bury them, much less pay their debts, and left their teenage son alone. No other surviving family members, no house, school over, no job, no prospects. She stuffed the five back and fished out a ten. "Get something to eat and try to clean up a little. I'll talk to a friend and see if I can get you a job, okay? Will you be here tomorrow?"

"Naw, I got an important appointment. Shit yes, I'll be here. What d'ya think?"

She ignored the attitude and crossed into the market, more preoccupied with wondering whom she could hit up to hire a former client than with the goodies at Fortunate Finery.

Then the crowd in the market jostled and assaulted her with noise, color and sensation from all directions so that she had to pay attention to keep from getting trampled or carried past the exit mat led underground, into the belly of the market, where Fortunate Finery nibbed elbows with rock shops and comic shops, antique stores and Afghanistan! imports, amni^g others.

The fellows at the fish market were tossing humongous salmon back and forth while entertaining the customers with their patter. She slopped in at Tenzmg Momo for wme Tibetan incense, bought crocheted catnip balls for her cats, and men docked around the comer to the ramp leading down to the next level.

The sandwich board was not out front, she noticed that right away. The door was closed, and the shop was dark even though it was already noon. She peered inside but could see no sign of Linden.

"Ahem," someone said behind her. A refined, ladylike, alto someone. "Excuse me," said the woman, stepping forward. She was as silvery and sparkly as a coho salmon leaping out of the bay into the sunlight Her hair was every hue and tint of silver from gunmetal through pewter through dove gray to white and curled to well below her shoulders, held back from her face by a silver rose. Silver-gray eyes full of intelligence and cool humor regarded Rose politely before turning their attention to the door lock. She wore white tights and gray Doc Martens under a long, heathery wool skirt with a silver-embroidered lace petticoat hanging out from under it and a long, loopy sweater spun with silvery threads and topped with a drift of a sequined and rhinestone-studded silvery scarf.

"Is Linden sick today?" Rose asked.

"No, she's been called away," the woman said, over her shoulder. "I'm assuming management at present." She had a low, throaty voice, a torch singer's voice, Rose thought, like Eartha Kitt or Candice Bergen.

Merle ambled up, his dog, Pal, trotting along beside him. He stopped and stood with one long jeans-clad leg bent at the knee, and leaned against the door frame with his forearm. He was a tall man with thinning brown hair and bad teeth, but his quick brown eyes and soft musical voice betrayed him as more than an ordinary street person, however much he liked to play the role. He came from a good family and could have been anything, but he'd been an angry young man and kept being angry well into middle age. Now he was mostly angry at himself for letting all of his chances go by. The songs he wrote were good and true and best of all, Rose thought, not self-centered. Musicians all over Seattle performed and recorded them with Merle's blessing, but Merle, no matter what other gigs he tried, always ended up back at the market. Pal looked up at the silver woman and whined, a happy whine.

"Linden's not around?" Merle asked the woman.

The silvery lady turned and gave him the somewhat appraising smile he took so much for granted that he didn't react to it one way or the other. "No, but I am. You must be Merle and this," she said, patting the dog's head, "is Pal. I've heard so much about you."

"You have?"

"Certainly."

"Excuse me," Rose said a bit more sharply than she intended. "Who are you?"

"I'm Felicity Fortune. I'm part owner of the shop, actually," she said with a faint trace of a British Isles accent-- Rose wasn't sure of the exact origin. To Merle she said, "I'm glad you've come. This letter came to the shop for you."

He accepted the letter and ran his fingers over it for a moment without even looking at the address. "I came to ask if Linden could look after Pal. I decided to ship out on a tanker for a while, pick up a little money. I want to make a new tape but I want it to be a really good one this time."

Merle was always talking about that. Except for one, the tapes remained unrecorded, and the one he had made had been so overproduced you could hardly hear the songs. Another of Merle's fatal flaws, she supposed--he was a good musician but a lousy producer.

Felicity opened the door and said, "Sorry to keep you standing in the hall while I prattle on. Do come in." Her smile was warm and genuinely kind, quite out of keeping with the rest of her silvery persona. She was not, Rose saw, even particularly pretty. More what you would call striking. Her features were strong and determined--a patrician nose and a square jaw--and something about the set of them reminded Rose of Linden.

"Linden never mentioned anyone else owning the store," Rose said, feeling anxious about her friend's absence. "Is she okay?"

"Oh, yes, dear. Just had a bit of an emergency. Thought it best if I filled in for the time being. Let me guess. You must be Rose."

"How did you know?"

"The mustard seed," she said, pointing to the pendant that Rose had decided to wear that morning on a whim, just to keep her spirits up.

Merle remained outside the door after Rose and Felicity entered the shop. When Rose looked back at him, she saw mat he was reading his letter. His lower jaw dropped and his eyes boggled, his head nodding rapidly as he reread it several times.

"Not bad news for you too?" Rose asked, experiencing her usual feeling that the whole world was falling apart at the seams.

"Oh, no. Rosie, you aren't going to believe this, but somebody sent Ace Jackson my tape. He wants to record two of my songs. He wants me to come to Nashville and talk to him about it."

"Merle, that's great!" she said, thinking how lucky it was that he had come to the shop before shipping out. "You really deserve it."

"Thanks," he said, his eyes still on the letter as he tugged at the dog's lead. "Come on, Pal. We got to think about this."

"Well, it's good to see somebody get a break," Rose said to Felicity. "I just hope he uses it to good advantage."

"Oh, I think he will," Felicity said, smiling that same assessing smile through the window at the retreating figures of the man and his dog.

"I wonder how he'll get the money to go to Nashville," Rose said, watching after them too. "Do you suppose Ace Jackson will send it to him?"

"Oh no," Felicity said with a rather surprising air of authority. "I imagine he'll find an unclaimed scratch tab which will suffice. He's ready for luck now, you see. He's outlived a lot of the influences opposing him. And he's worked for it. That sort of people are still the easiest kind to make lucky."

"Excuse me. I don't want to be rude or anything, but how would you know?" Rose asked, her initial sense of irritation with the stranger returning. There was something so theatrical about Felicity Fortune--so deliberately mysterious--that Rose could not help but wonder if she was just being weird or if she really was weird.

"I know quite a bit, actually," Felicity said, flopping down in an overstaffed chair and making no effort to count out the till, turn on the lights, or open the door for other customers.

"Where exactly is Linden, then?" Rose asked in a tone that brooked no evasion.

"If you must know, she wasn't quite up to the job here," Felicity said, playing idly with a peacock feather fan.

"You said you were part owner. You didn't fire her?"

"Oh, no. She's gone on for further training. She suggested you as a possible candidate too, and as a senior member, I was sent to sort things out."

"A senior member of what?"

"A sort of sorority Linden and I belong to, one that helps people."

"Uh-huh. Linden never mentioned any sorority, and we've known each other a long time."

"Oh, she wouldn't mention this one," Felicity said, rummaging in the ridiculously small beaded evening purse she carried at her side slung from a belt that seemed to be made of fine-link chain mail. "She's just been a pledge until now. Wait a bit. I have a card in here someplace."

She produced one that read, in calligraphy-style script, "Dame Felicity Fortune, Godmothers (Anonymous), Fan-Fates Facilitated, Questers Accommodated, and Virtue Vindicated. True Love and Serendipity Our Specialty."

Rose read it and chuckled with relief. "1 might have known. That Linden. I never really figured her for a practical joker, but this is a good one. We were kidding around about this yesterday. Where is she really? Who are you? And please don't tell me you're the fairy godmother."

"Oh, no. I wouldn't put you on like that. I'm only one of the Godmothers and we're not exactly all fairies, not anymore. At one time, of course, that was true, but the fey actually found that human agents, properly seasoned, work out better. More identity with the subject. Just as many of you in your profession were yourselves the products of troubled childhoods so you now identify with your clients."

No wonder she was so theatrical! She was an actress. For some reason, maybe to give Merle his bit of good news, Linden had hired an actress to come in and play an elaborate joke on them all. Well, nobody could say Rose lacked a sense of humor. She played along, grinning to show that she knew what was happening, "Gee, that's very democratic of the fey. So okay, if you're who you say you are, how about my wish?"

Felicity nodded graciously. She was some actress, all right.

"Well," Rose said. "First of all, the division's budget could use one of those bottomless purses that were always turning up in the fairy tales. I don't suppose you've got one just lying around anywhere, do you?"

To her surprise, Felicity didn't do any fakey bibbity-bobbity-booing but snapped the peacock feathers of her fan together in a disgusted way. "That's it, throw money at it! Honestly, you Americans! And I thought you took your work more seriously than that."

"Money is serious," Rose insisted, drawn into earnest discussion in spite of herself. "Senate appropriations cut our budget by half this year."

"I'll look into it, though mind you, we don't do bottomless purses anymore. Too crude and very bad for the economy in general. Inflation and all that." She turned a shrewd gaze on Rose and for the first time, Rose saw that her eyes were very strange indeed--did they make holographic contact lenses these days? Felicity's eyes had that same crystalline look about them, and Rose thought for a moment that she could see rainbows in the irises.

"Also," Felicity continued shrewdly, and dead seriously, "a bottomless purse for your division would be of very little use to the persons it's meant to help if the money is spent under the direction of someone unsuitable."

Before Rose could protest that Linden surely must have briefed her about Rose's work situation, Felicity added, "I notice that you didn't ask anything for yourself, however. Your wish, in fact, was for reinforcements, a fairy godmother for the city of Seattle. Now that seems a little odd, Rose Samson. True, you don't believe 1 am who I am as yet, though you will, but have you no wish for yourself? I'd hate to think you were someone with a bit of that Messiah complex the pop psychologists are always on about."

Rose shrugged. "Maybe so, but I already have quite a bit compared to most of the people I work with. I've got a job, a home, food, and money enough to buy clothes from your shop if I want."

"Don't you wish for anything else? True love, maybe?"

Fred's face popped into her mind, but Rose said sensibly, "Felicity, no offense, but that's not something you get just by wishing." After all, she didn't even know if he was involved or not, or anything else about his personal life. She might not even like him if she knew him well and besides, real true love happened between the two people involved, not because some dingbat in motley silver waved a magic wand. Besides, there were lots of things more important than her own love life--or lack of it

"I see," Felicity said.

"Look," Rose said kindly but firmly, "it's nice of you to encourage me, but lots of people don't even have the basics, much less two lovely cats and a vintage clothing collection. Sure my dad left us when I was a kid, but he continued to support us, and my mother was an alcoholic, but she sobered up before she died and we were able to deal with a lot of our issues together. Meanwhile, I've managed to make a very nice life for myself and I'm trying to help other people do the same."

"Survivor guilt, eh?"

"Will you cut that out? I'm just counting my blessings," she said. Before she could say any more Felicity, who reminded her a bit of a forties movie star with her dramatic gestures and grand, perhaps a bit matronizing tone, waved her own assessment of her motivations aside.

"Well, dear, there's nothing wrong with that, and mercy knows / would be the last to suggest there was anything wrong with you for wishing to bring blessings to others. It is, in fact, my raison d'etre as well. However, if you could bring yourself to be a teensy bit more selfish and wish for something the wee-est bit more personal, it would be easier to prove my usefulness to you."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You will be wanting to put me to the test, n'est-ce pas?"

"Mats non," said Rose, who could joke around as well as anyone. She was used to dealing with somewhat deranged people, and this woman seemed at least to be well inten-tioned. However, a reality check was in order. "Ms. Fortune, I'm sorry if you are under the misapprehension that, in passing time with my friend Linden, I somehow gave the impression mat I wanted your help or advice. The truth is, as a social services professional employed by the City of Seattle and the State of Washington, I have rules to uphold, and one of those rales is that I don't tell you notbin' about nobody nohow no time, period. No matter what you show me, promise me, or give me. So please, let me disabuse you of any notions you may have that I will at any time break client confidentiality so you can prove--whatever it is you're trying to prove. Whatever you imagine you can do, the clients I have now, and my list by no means covers all of the people in the city who need help, have devastatingly real problems. Many of them face tragic, frightening, frustrating, humiliating, dangerous, even life-threatening situations every day. I--we--are trying to help them survive a little longer, in hopes that somehow they can last until improvement can be made."

Felicity Fortune was net the least put out, but dropped most of the melodrama, except for an eloquently raised eyebrow. "Well put, Rose Samson, and very loyal, I'm sure. But you'd be surprised what I can imagine, and what I've coped with. I notice you only say that you hope to help your clients to survive until improvements can be made-- not until you can make them. Or they can make them."

"I'm being realistic," Rose said. "I can only do so much, the division can only do so much. Many of the clients could do more for themselves than we can possibly do for them if only they had the will or--"

"Or the luck?" Felicity Fortune asked, then waved the fan dismissively. "Oh, I know. I know. Luck is extremely unscientific, but like many unscientific things, it's also extremely useful. It also happens to be my business."

"Oh, cute! I get it! Your name is Felicity Fortune, as in good luck, and you make--ta da--good luck!"

ROSE EXPECTED A disclaimer but Felicity Fortune simply tried to look modest "Let's just say I--that is, we of the Godmothers--have made a study of its creation and have become somewhat--scientific--in reproducing it where and when it is needed."

"Oh, well, that's different," Rose said, settling down crosslegged on the floor and cupping her chin in her hands while nodding to Felicity Fortune to continue. Rose was a good listener. These days, other than filling oat forms, listening was about all she could do. At least Felicity Fortune had a fairly original delusion. "Okay, so tell me. You're the fairy godmother, right? And you've come to make me and the city of Seattle live happily ever after?"

"I shall certainly try, with your assistance, of course. But first I think it is my turn to clear up any misapprehensions you may have about fairy godmothers and their historical role." Felicity Fortune now sounded less like an actress man a college professor. "The tales most people are familiar with tend to be highly revisionist. That is, the viewpoint taken is that of the person or people who triumphed in the situation in question, and any subtler details, random injustices or atrocities are swept under the rug."

"According to Bruno Bettelheim and some of the other authorities on the subject, the tales are metaphors for psychological processes," Rose said. "I have a lot of trouble with them even in that context. Are you trying to tell me that they are literally true stories?"

"Parts of true stories, yes. True as far as they go, yes. But highly adulterated, even by those Grimm boys, who like all boys were unduly fascinated by the gory bits. Actually, the real fault lies not in how they told the tales but the tales they left out. You see, the fairy stories mostly only tell about the cases in which we triumphed in our quest to bring truth, justice, happiness and a higher moral order to the universe."

"That is a tall order," Rose said. "I can see how if you've been doing this for a long time, parts were bound to have been left out."

"Yes, and those parts are what make us so unbelievable to a smart young woman such as yourself. Like you, we aren't always successful, and also like you, and I'm sure you'll take no offense that I say so, we do make mistakes. In a few of those instances, the tales have been altered to make us look good. For instance, there was the time Dame Agatha met a young woman and started to ask her for a piece of bread. Dame Agatha is actually notoriously bad at disguises and forgot to remove her jewels when she put on her rags. Besides which, she's a bit on the plump side. So when she asked the girl for bread, the girl, who it later turned out was having a bad episode of PMS so that the very thought of food made her nauseous, told Agatha she ought to be bloody ashamed of herself posing as a beggar when there were so many people in dire straits. It shows more intelligence than hard-heartedness, seen in that light, but before she could finish her sentence she had toads coming out of her mourn.

"Then along comes her flighty sister, sees Agatha's jewels, puts two and two together and decides Agatha's some dotty socialite with a bob or two to give away. She was dieting anyway, that one, so she gave Agatha a whole cake and as soon as she said, 'You're welcome,' right off her mouth starts dripping diamonds and pearls."

"The moral being that good manners pay?" Rose ventured.

"The moral being that manners are superficial and if you're going to impersonate a beggar you should bloody well take off your tiara first. The sister who dripped toads was ordinarily a bright and conscientious individual who read six books a week, carried medicines and food to plague victims, and privately donated to distressed families. Poor thing merely had a gruff way of expressing herself at certain times of the month, but there you were, the damage was done and she was spitting toads for the rest of her life. Being a resourceful sort, she wrote some of the earliest known papers on amphibian biology. Meanwhile, her flighty sister, who was a chatterbox, spouted diamonds and pearls until they became quite valueless and thereby bankrupted the royal treasury and the country as a whole. You never hear about mat though, I daresay."

'True," Rose admitted.

"So you see what I mean. Of course, that particular example is neither life-threatening nor especially horrible, unless you have an aversion to toads, but we've dealt with many situations which were. Back in the days when these earliest case histories were compiled, there were, as there are now, plenty of wicked stepparents, starving and home* less people, abandoned and abused children and physically and mentally wounded war veterans. Besides which, there was quite a rigid class system. The unfortunates had no .one to aid them save kindly individuals, who were very scarce.

"That is why the Queen of Fairy recruited us."

"Right"

"I don't quite understand. The little I've heard about fairies these days says that they were alien, spooky creatures who hated humankind."

"I don't know about alien and spooky. Rose dear, but humankind was even harder to love back then than it is now. Her Majesty, a truly great lady, though much misunderstood, decided mat if it was ever to improve, someone must see to it that at least a few of the worthier specimens among the mortals were preserved against the depredations of the world. That is how our sorority was born. We are her agents, you see, and have continued to do her work throughout the centuries."

"That's very sweet," Rose said, gently. "But I'm afraid the Queen of Fairy couldn't even dream of some of the problems we have today--"

"On the contrary. People are not much different than they have always been, although they are, as you may have gathered, slightly better because of our efforts."

"There's never been a drug problem like there is now! It's epidemic! And there's AIDS and all sorts of other--"

"Ever heard of the Black Plague? I'm not denigrating the problems you face today, Rose, certainly not, or I wouldn't be here, but in my day a greater percentage of people died just from giving birth, malnutrition or working themselves to death than die of all of your diseases put together."

"Sure," Rose said, grinning. "And in those days you had to walk ten miles to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways in the dark. I know."

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's something parents always say. You know. Life in the old days was harder than it was now. I don't see how it's gotten much better; maybe it did for a while, but these days everything, health care, law enforcement, ecology, the economy--just everything--is deteriorating very fast. I know, I know, it's not the Black Plague, but back in your day at least the environment was still healthy and, according to you, you had enough magic to make pearls and diamonds come out of people's mouths."

"Yes, the planet was healthy, but people weren't, and while we did have somewhat more access to magic, we did not have whole organizations full of young people like you to do all of the boring bits. Nor could we always help, even with magic. Sometimes we intervened too late, sometimes the forces we could arrange on the good side were too weak for really determined wickedness, and sometimes the whole world was simply aligned against those we would aid. But we always did try. As you are trying. And we do have methods and resources not presently at your disposal."

As Felicity spoke, Rose smiled at the surreality of debating the comparative damage of the Black Plague and AIDS and the comparative merits of social work vs. magic with someone who claimed to have personal experience of all of the topics. Oh well, at least Felicity Fortune wasn't claiming to be Madonna. Rose had processed six clients like that last week--an odd split between those who thought they were the rock star and those who believed they were the mother of Christ, with one breaking the tie who thought she was the rock star and the mother of Christ

"Sounds great," Rose told Felicity. "If only it were true!"

"It is, believe me. You do have to believe, Rose. That's always been part of the equation, and as I told you, I'm perfectly willing to give you a demonstration. Ah-ah-ah! I didn't say I wanted you to violate any secrets. Perish the thought. But surely there's someone you'd like to help who doesn't need to be kept quite so hush-hush. Someone, perhaps, not covered in your tine of work. An animal, perhaps? Even animals can use good fortune and true love."

"We-ell," she said, thinking of poor Cindy Ellis in danger of losing her job at the stable to her greedy bitch of a stepmother. "You don't happen to know any honest lawyers who take cases out of the good of their hearts or are willing to barter riding lessons for services, do you?"

"Not offhand, but give me a little time, Rose. Haven't been here long. Must do some networking. That sort of situation can be solved in a variety of ways--the best of which involve making certain contacts. In the old days, we always had to involve commoners, widows and orphans, that sort of thing, with the royal family. If you could get a prince or princess interested, well, there you were. The whole thing was easy to solve. Much more difficult in a democratic country."

"Well, but then there's always your magic wand, right?" "At one time, certainly. But these days magic, like all natural resources, must be used sparingly. Very sparingly. Dame Prudence of the Accounting Committee monitors the expenditure of magical energy even more strictly than Puget Power monitors electricity. There is a great deal of need in the world and far less magic, so we attempt to conserve that resource whenever possible and use only as much as is necessary to get the ball rolling, you might say. Most of what we do these days consists of putting the right people and the right circumstances together, very much as I suppose you do in your job with trying to find the proper organization to deal with your clients' problems. But as you know, sometimes that will not suffice, and then we resort to magic."

"So you couldn't give me a bottomless purse if you wanted to?"

"I fear not. The mere mention of that device is enough to give poor Dame Prudence apoplexy. It is definitely not within my allotment. Even if it were, I wouldn't be so reckless. The larger magical withdrawals, like the overuse of any resource, involve costs which may easily outweigh the original benefit and result in highly unpleasant repercussions."

"I see."

"And that's only one of the problems. Magic also must be used only in aid of the worthy. There's simply not enough of it to punish wrongdoers these days."

"That figures. There aren't enough jails or counselors or any other means of dealing with them either," Rose said.

"Exactly. About all we can do in that line is to protect ourselves and those we are trying to help from them as much as possible, but mostly, the magic is only expended hi aid of the worthy."

"So how do you choose who's worthy?" Rose thought every congressman who had ever tried to regulate the welfare system would love to have the answer to that particular question.

"Very carefully. If you're to use magic to bestow good fortune on an individual who might not have acquired it by other means, that good fortune must be balanced in their lives by their degree of need to begin with, or the amount of good they have done themselves or have the capacity for doing, to earn it, you see? That's one reason we so often help children and young people. With their lives ahead of them, they have the greatest potential for good and the most tune to realize it."

"If you're all that magical, why let people get hurt at all? Or is it a question of not enough to go around again?"

"Partially that, I suppose, for there's certainly evil we all wish we could prevent. But often a spot of bad fortune can change someone very much for the better, developing empathy and compassion. If you can help someone out of one of those spots, then all that remains is to put opportunities to succeed at goodness in their way. Several of our more effective agents have been recruited during those periods in their lives."

"What if they never have the bad fortune? Is that good?"

"You're toying with me now. Rose. Of course, whether it's good or bad is entirely subjective. The real point is that if their fortune isn't bad, men they don't present a problem we have to deal with, and may be able to provide practical assistance to others."

"Sounds like you have a use for everybody."

"Not quite everybody. There are always a few who succumb to despair from the cradle on and will not recognize the possibility of good fortune when they see it."

"You can't help them?"

Felicity shrugged. "We're not what they need. At least, they usually aren't like the ones who actively enjoy the pain of others."

"The ones you can't fight?"

"I didn't say we can't fight mem, just that we can't punish them."

"You could, you know, rehabilitate them. That's what we do these days."

"Do you really?" Felicity asked, cocking her brow again.

"Not always--well, very rarely, actually, but at least we're not trying to make two wrongs equal a right."

"Commendable, I'm sure, but I do wonder, dear, if you've considered that there are those who are not merely unfortunate or deranged but actually evil."

"Maybe. But there are so many people causing damage for other reasons that it's a little hard to tell who's who, don't you think?"

"You do have a point," Felicity conceded. "At any rate, as I said before, punishment of wrongdoers is not our purpose. If we see to it that good is distributed to the deserving and the prepared, men we may assume that evil will be discouraged at the very least."

"Discourager of Evil," Rose said. "Doesn't have much ring to it."

"That's reality for you," Felicity said. "It lacks style."

"So, back to rewarding the really deserving, if we can be judgmental in the other direction for a moment. Were you the one who turned Ace Jackson on to Merle's songs? Did you use magic to do that?"

"Oh, no, dear. That was a friend of mine. Do you remember reading that Serena Starr, the country singer, had a dreadful childhood and would have been forced to stay with the stepfather who molested her after her mother's death except that she was discovered by Dallas Glover, the agent, and made a star? Serena was one of our girls. Clients, I mean. She was delighted with Merle's songs but felt they were more Ace's style than hers."

"Wow. But how did she find out about them? Oh. Linden, I guess."

Felicity Fortune nodded. "One of our most valuable trainees."

Rose took a deep breath. By this time, she was starting to take Felicity Fortune at her word. No doubt all this talk of wishes was the result of a wish-fulfillment dream, and Rose would awaken in her own bedroom in Bremerton. Meanwhile, why not see how far this crazy conversation would take her? "Felicity, 1 don't know whether to believe you or not, but you were asking about animals. Do you like horses?"

"My dear, I was a jockey as a young girl."

"Good. You and Cindy ought to get along fine. I was on my way to see a friend of mine today--she's just started working at a stable up near Gasworks Park- You want to come?"

"I certainly do," Felicity said, nibbing her hands together in the most theatrical gesture yet "Lead on, Samson. The game's afoot"

"Where are you parked?' Felicity asked.

"I take the bus when I'm on this side," Rose said.

"Highly commendable. But perhaps this time you'll let me drive?"

"Okay by me/' Rose said. The visit with Felicity had taken longer than the stop to say hello to Linden, and she wanted time for a trot with Cindy before dark. Maybe Felicity was a psycho, but she seemed harmless enough. Her delusion was apparently gentle in a codependent sort of way, and she must be a friend of Linden's, or she wouldn't have had the key to the shop. Besides, if by some wild chance she was one of the rare female serial killers specializing in the murders of women running vintage clothing shops, men Rose surely ought to keep her eye on her. And even if she wasn't exactly a fairy godmother, she had a fairly interesting view of nonsupernatural ways to network and help people. Any port in a storm, Rose thought

Felicity locked up, and the two of them ascended the ramp into the market. The day was darkening already, and garlands of lightbulbs lit the vendors' booms. They threaded then- way through the throng at the seafood vendor and out onto the street A brisk breeze whipped pieces of paper and foam cups down First Dico Miller still huddled on the street corner.

"I thought you'd have gone off to dinner by now," Rose said, then noticed Dico was cradling his hand. "What's the matter?"

"Hurt my hand."

"How?"

"Trying to hang onto the money you give me."

"Shit," Rose said. "Who took it?"

Dico shrugged. "I dunno. Didn't look too close. It ain't healthy."

"Felicity, I..." Rose started to introduce her to Dico and ask if she had a job for him around the store, but the silver-haired woman wasn't paying any attention. Instead, she was kneeling at the mouth of the alley and enticing a gray alley cat by rubbing her fingers together.

"Come here, you lazy puss. Yes, that's right. Come here."

The cat came purring, expecting a treat. Instead, Felicity scooped it up and began whispering to it.

"Felicity, this is Dico. Do you think you have a ...?"

"Most certainly. I have a very fine cat right here. Here you go, young man," she said, unloading the cat into the boy's arms, which made him swear when the cat with unerring accuracy, landed on his sore hand. "Now you two take care of each other."

Rose rolled her eyes and nodded at Felicity, and Dico shook his head. Burdening the poor guy with a pet wasn't exactly her idea of helping him, especially with Linden unavailable to lend a hand if he was unable to feed the animal. But if Dico was dismayed, the cat took the situation in stride and had settled into the space created by the young man's crossed legs. It washed its white socks as serenely as if it was sitting on its own private windowsill.

"Here we are," Felicity said, stopping in front of a rounded boxy car, shaped rather like the old VW bugs but painted Porsche silver. It had a bumper sticker on the trunk lid that said, "Commit acts of random kindness and senseless beauty." The car bore no manufacturer's model name, nor did Rose recognize the make.

"Don't tell me. It flies," she guessed.

"No, but it is fueled by carbon monoxide from the exhaust of other vehicles, and emits oxygen fumes as its own exhaust."

"Wait a minute. That sounds suspiciously plantlike. This thing didn't start out in life as a pumpkin by any chance, did itr

She was kidding Felicity in a way that would have been rather dangerous had the woman been seriously deranged. People got very upset if you made jokes about their delusional systems ordinarily, but Felicity just winked and said, "Really, Rose, you must allow me a few trade secrets."

"I like the bumper sticker."

"It's not original," Felicity told her. "But as Prince Charming used to say, if the shoe fits, wear it."

SNO JUMPED BACK from the man and his knife. "Like, who are you?" she asked, panting. "What's your problem? Are you some kinda pervert or something?"

"Shut up," the man said, lunging for her. "Shut up and commere."

She could turn. She could run. But he was a tall man with long legs, and she was wearing a skirt. He could catch her in an even race.

"No," she said. "Uh-uh. I'm not making it easy for you. Look, mister, I don't know who you are or how you got the letter or why you picked on me, but you got a helmet on, I can't see your face. Just leave me alone and this never happened, okay?" He feinted at her and she jumped back, trembling. The fact that she was able to talk at all she attributed to feeling as if she was watching something on TV happen to somebody else.

"Give it up, little girl," the man said gruffly. "You got nowhere to run to, know what I mean? I can make it so you never feel a thing. I don't like hurting little girls, but you've seriously annoyed somebody with connections. That tends to be fatal, in my cultural milieu. So don't make me slash you to death, okay?"

He lunged again and Sno, who had not found his speech at all reassuring, jumped behind the bike and shoved it toward him.

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He leaped back, then sprinted over the bike and caught her wrist. Without thinking, she grabbed his wrist with her other hand and threw him. Her judo lessons had finally come in handy. He lay there on the ground, staring up at her while she stared back at him, both of them unable to believe that she had actually decked him. Then she took to her heels and ran like hell.

Deep in the forest at that time there dwelled a group of former soldiers, all grown much older than they had been in the war, though no less troubled by all that they had seen and heard and done. They had come to the forest to do a sweat lodge and a lot of drumming, trying to bring peace to their spirits, if not to the forest. There, were seven of them, these veterans, and they were called Doc, Doper, Chief, Red-Eye, Dead-Eye, Drifty and Trip-Wire. Originally there were eight but the eighth, the African-American sergeant known for his stealth in ambush as Sneaky-Pete, had taken a job as a personal security officer for an internationally famous dance troupe of former inner-city children from Detroit whp were currently performing at a dance festival in Port Townsend, Washington. So he couldn't make it.

Doc was out chopping wood that morning while Doper and Chief were down at the river catching breakfast They had the cabin for two weeks and had only been here for a couple of days. It was pretty well hidden. The cabin was accessible by road most of the way, until the route to the camp took off onto an overgrown side road that had been washed out by a feeder stream, leaving a huge ravine that had to be carefully negotiated, then the stream forded, in a pack trip that took an hour or two. This time of year, with the snowfall frequent and the roads plowed much less often, the place was fairly remote. It wasn't so remote, however, mat any of them felt foolish about not registering with the Park Service, especially since the register had disappeared, along with the Park Service building that used to be there just before you reached the Shuksan campground. Besides, they weren't doing anything dangerous or illegal, they had plenty of winter gear and lots of fuel and they all needed time away from civilization and together.

They hadn't known each other in-country. Hadn't even been in the same place at around the same time. Doc had served two tours early in the war as a medic, one tour largely in the Central Highlands with the Montagnard tribesmen, one taking classified hikes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail where it skirted Laos and Cambodia, with several also classified forays into those countries for a variety of classified reasons he still had trouble confronting. He'd spent a lot of the time since he'd been back getting drunk or high and getting over getting drunk or high, being in bad relationships, getting good jobs, jobs he loved, where people thought highly of him until he inevitably freaked out. Then he walked into his first vet center, talked to the counselor, participated in rap sessions and started working on his counseling degree while volunteering at the center himself. Now he was a full-fledged counselor, but this wasn't exactly a center-sponsored activity. This was something he was doing for himself, with friends.

Getting away. Clean air and water, beautiful scenery, snow, wood to chop, fires to build, singing and drumming, thinking, praying, talking to other guys, purifying himself in the sweat lodge. It had been great for the weekend. But something restless and dissatisfied inside himself, the cynical, asshole part that had controlled him totally when he drank, was sneering, "Okay. Been there. Done that. Now what?" Be still, he told himself, be still and experience this.

Then he heard the screams and tore off like a round from an AK-47.

Magic Flute

Taking money from street people like Dico Miller was only practice for bigger and better things, Nguyen Ding Hoa assured the Guerillas as the gang gathered on the fire escape of Ding's building and smoked the profits of their morning's labors.

The Guerillas blew smoke rings and nodded, cool. Like Ding, many of them wore their straight black or dark brown hair long, with a kerchief tied around their foreheads like an Indian headband. They were laughing and joking about the expressions on people's faces--the little black dude had about cried when they'd taken the money they'd just seen the woman give him. A ten! Most of those people didn't get that much all day.

Ding was doing a humorous impression of the poor geek when the window to his parents' apartment banged open and his mother's face appeared in the opening. "Ding," she said. "La dei."

"In a minute. Mom," he said.

"Now," his mother said firmly. She stood only four feet eight and weighed less than eighty pounds, but every ounce of her was made of steel springs.

"I'm with the gang, Mom," he said.

"You come," she said. He sometimes ignored her and his father. He would have liked to now, with his head light from the weed he'd been smoking and his friends giggling and looking on. But one glance at his mother's set face and he knew now was not going to be one of those times.

"Later, dudes," he said.

Le groaned. "Oh, man, you're not going to go ..."

"Got to. Mom hasn't been feeling good. I better see if she needs me to get her something."

"Give her a hit of this, man," Huong suggested, holding out the joint

"Hunh," Ding snorted in appreciation. He took the joint, then turned his back on the guys to climb in the window, blocking his mother's face from the gang and the gang from her.

"So, what's so important?" be asked her, when they were well away from the window.

"You!" she said, giving him a sharp one-handed shove that, although he towered over her, sent him reeling back into uie Living room, while all the time cursing him in Vietnamese. "You steal from beggars to buy drugs!"

"Mom, it wasn't like that, okay?" he replied in English, men switched to Vietnamese, "It's not like it's real drugs, just a little hash, like you had in Vietnam..."

His mother pushed him again and he sat down abruptly on the dilapidated foam futon that served as both a couch and his bed. She actually spat at him. "You who have had every chance are behaving like trash! Your father and I are both of good families. You think all he does is sweep out stores, but he was a doctor! Even when we were refugees, we did not steal. We worked. And we certainly didn't steal from beggars. Yoo behave like a common shoeshine boy, roaming the streets and stealing! Is it for this we came to America, so our son could become a thief? Better we had all died under the communists. Better we had died in the refugee camps!"

"Mother, these street bums just have money given to them. They grew up here with everything. Most of them never had a war or the camps. They can share a little. We bust our asses in this country and get nowhere because the Americans are so afraid of Asian kids being smarter and more ambitious than they are. You saw how it was with me. I couldn't get into the university."

"No, but you got into jail! We save you from prison in Vietnam, we bring you from the camps, and you go to jail here."

"Jail here is better than the camps, Mom. The people have so much and they won't share ..."

"The UN doctor shared," his mother reminded him. "And the church group. And you used to share too, my son. You were a better person when you had nothing."

He closed his mouth and turned his face to the wall until she hurried off to her job. By that time it was raining harder than the usual Seattle drizzle and the gang had dispersed. He didn't feel like calling them back again.

He sat astride the duct-taped, patched vinyl seat of the rickety kitchen chair watching the rain run down the crack in the window and relit the joint. As he got quietly stoned, his mother's words and the disappointment and anger in her face stabbed through the smoke and through his own bitterness. Maybe he should have died in the camps, but somebody had promised him a chance.

It had been raining like this that day, another long dreary day in monsoon season, and he'd carried his rice bowl away from the quonset hut where his parents and the other adults squatted, eating their rice. The rain gushed through holes in the tin roof and beat so loudly that it sounded like a thousand drums.

Talking of their home, of the war, of family that was left behind and of what would become of the young people, talking of their bowels and their teeth and their skin diseases, the adults shouted in piercing voices between carefully savored nibbles of rice.

Ding could not bear it that day. The constant din of rain made him feel as if he wanted to peel off his skin and run screaming through the barbed wire, but the cold and the dankness made his bones ache and his toes and hands and balls shrivel and shrink.

When he grew old here, what would he talk about? How it was during the early days in the camp?

He went to find his gang and eat with mem. He had another gang in those days, his first gang, his friends, boys he had grown up with. Several of (hem had gone by then--Dao and Phuong had died earlier in the month from the fever that spread before the UN health officials came with their shots, several of the other guys were in the hospital, and Linn, the lucky devil, had been shipped out with his family to America. There had been talk mat soon the Hong Kong government was going to return them all to Vietnam and turn them over to the communist government It wouldn't be so hard on the ones who had no parents. The communists would train them to do something, take care of them, maybe give them jobs, but bis parents would be punished, perhaps killed, if they had done even half what they claimed to help the Americans. Ding had not wanted to return to Vietnam. Not even if they made him president. He wanted to see America. He would make a good American, he would learn to drive a car and play a guitar and wear clothes same like the doctors from Seattle and Portland who had come with the UN. One of them sang a song all the time he was examining people and giving shots and Ding sang it to himself as he hunched over his rice, sheltering under the branches of a tree that overhung the barbed wire. He couldn't remember much of it, and began humming a Vietnamese song instead as he dipped into his rice bowl.

That was when he'd heard her.

"Please, son, share your meal with an old lady?" a tiny pathetic voice had whined near his elbow. He looked down and saw a wizened little woman with betel-blackened teeth staring up at him through cataract-clouded eyes.

"Where's your own rice bowl, Auntie?" he asked. His parents had taught him to treat every elderly person as if he or she were his own grandparent. His grandparents, of course, were lost long ago in Vietnam.

The old woman too had had her losses.

"My son died last week and gang toughs stole it from me with no strong son to protect me. Please. I'm very weak."

"Who stole it from you, Auntie?" he asked.

"Boys," she said. "Big strong boys like you, like my son. They've eaten it all. You can't get it back."

"No, but you will need your bowl. Here, you eat mine and I'll go settle with them." Part of him just wanted a fight.

She took his bowl and ate the rice hungrily, saying, "No. Don't go. It is enough that I eat now. You're a kind young man. And musical. Didn't I hear you singing?"

"Yes."

"What was that song?"

He told her the name of the Vietnamese song he had been singing, but she said, "No, the other one. Was that an American song?"

"Yes, Bac Si Baker from Seattle sang it always and I learned it from him."

"What is it? It is very strange."

Ding had known nothing then, nothing about music, nothing about America. He had told her, "It is the story of Lou-Le Lou-Ly but I cannot make out the words. When the Colonel remembers the work of my mother and sends for us to come to America, I will learn the meaning," he said, but he knew he was boasting. The Colonel didn't remember his mother. She had only been a secretary.

"Yes, that is so," the old woman said. "You sing well. Do you play any instruments?"

Ding laughed a bitter laugh. "Where would I find an instrument here?"

"I have here a bamboo flute," the old woman said, withdrawing a slender pipe from her rags. "It is a worthless thing, except for the music it makes."

"How do you play it?"

"You blow softly--here--and finger the notes, like this," she said, and played back to him the Vietnamese tune he had been singing. "Would you like to try?"

"Yes," he said. And after only a couple of false tries, he played "Lou-Le Lou-Ly." When he finished playing the tune, he turned to the old auntie, grinning with happiness at his success.

Funny. What happened next he had never thought twice about until today, but simply accepted. He hadn't had anything to smoke then, he knew, but maybe he'd been delirious from hunger. He'd questioned things less back then, which was just as well.

For the old auntie had gone, and in her place was a beautiful lady, shining and smiling and he knew without asking that she was the goddess of mercy, Kwan Yin. He had heard his father describe her sometimes, and this was just how she should look. Lotus in one hand, jewel in another, flowing silken robes that did not dampen with the rain.

He wasn't sure if he was supposed to bow or grovel in the mud or what, but as he started to kneel she said, "No, no. The flute is a magic one. It is good for a wish. This wish I give to you because you kindly shared your rice with a hungry elder."

"I wish my family and I would go to America," he said.

'Tell the flute," she said.

He played his American song again, and when he looked back, she was gone. He was not sure how else to wish to go to America, so that day he went around to all of the elders, asking them to tell him what they remembered of the Americans, especially if they remembered songs. Some remembered snatches, which he played on his flute. People were pleased to hear the music.

The next day, a letter from a Seattle church group came saying that the group was sponsoring Ding's family to move to Seattle.

Ding threw the remainder of the joint on the floor and crushed it with his toe, disgusted. Cheap shit. It was supposed to help you mellow out, forget, not remember.

Dico MILLER STARED after Rose and the silvery woman with amazement, then looked down into the whiskery face of the gray tabby cat in his lap. It seemed to be waiting for him to pet it, feed it, say something to it.

"What in the hell does that woman think I'm gonna do wit' you, pussycat?" he asked it.

The cat switched its tail a little and dug its claws into his bare knee where it peeked out of the fabric of his jeans, shredded by age rather than fashion.

"Ow! Shit, cat. I guess I could maybe sell you to Trinh Tran's Restaurant over there. You look like you been eatin' reg'lar, which is more than I can say for me."

The cat nudged his fingers with its head. It definitely wanted to be petted. Oh, well, its fur was warm. "Maybe I'll just sell 'em the inside of your fur and I'll keep it for mittens. Huh? You want to be mittens?"

"My fur is much wanner to you and me both with me inside it, genius," the cat said. "Besides, your hungry and cold days are coming to an end. You've got me now."

"And what might you be exactly, cat? Other than another mouth."

"Don't think of me as another mouth," the cat said, rubbing his hand some more. "Think of me as your mouthpiece. Stick with me, sonny, and I'll change your life."

About that time, it dawned on Dico that the cat was actually talking to him, or at least that he thought the cat was actually talking to him, which meant one of several things, all of them being that everything he'd gone through, the deaths of his parents, the loss of his home, being put on the street to be beaten by toughs, pressured to sell or use drugs, all of it had combined to drive him nuts. The cat just looked at him like, of course, you're nuts, sucker, whaddyathink? Who ever heard of a real talking cat?

He started to cry in earnest, right there on the street, his head down in his folded arms, which were hugging his knees. The cat jumped up on his shoulders, draped itself across his neck and purred in his ear.

"Come on," it said. "Pull yourself together. You got to find a grocer someplace and get us some chow and get me a flea comb and a proper collar."

"Kitty, you got any idea how much that stuff costs and how little I got?"

"And have you got any idea how much cats in cat-food commercials make for faking half of what I can do? Move your butt, mister."

When Felicity Fortune and Rose drove up to the stable, Cindy was totally surrounded by young girls who were looking on curiously while Cindy inspected the corn on a horse's foot and lectured her class on what might make a horse limp or walk badly and how proper shoeing could treat the problem. The stable was small, set in two tin-roofed buildings with a shed for hay, and Rose saw only four of the horses, but they looked quite well cared for. There was a sign above the barn door that read, "Lucky Shoe Stables, Horses Boarded and Rented by the Hour. Riding Classes, Beginners and Advanced. Inquire Within."

"So what will you do for Punkin's corn then, Cindy?" one of the girls wanted to know.

Cindy set down the horse's hoof and pushed back her wild mane of curly black hair with one wrist. Her hand had gotten rather mucky at some point. "As you can see, I've pulled off the shoe so it doesn't put pressure on the corn. The last farrier didn't see the problem developing and so gave her a standard shoe. Now we have to wait for a specialty farrier--one who not only recognizes foot problems but knows how to make the shoes to fit--to come and replace the shoe with one that will have a piece cut out where the corn is. Other kinds of shoes may include lifts on one side to compensate for turned-in feet, like orthopedic shoes. Relieving the pressure on Punkin's foot and not working her until she's properly reshod is about all we can do for now. Rose! You did come!" she cried, and waved across the heads of the girls. "Okay, gang. Class dismissed. See you Thursday."

She gave Rose a hug. Her arms were very strong, and her hands rather hard and callused. She shook Felicity's hand with a firm grip and shot Rose an inquiring glance while Felicity's own was inspecting the premises.

"What a lovely place!" Felicity said.

Cindy grinned. "Isn't it? The boss leases the bridle trails from the park but he has plans to buy real grounds for the trails some day. If I get my inheritance, I could buy in as a partner."

Felicity seemed to be having a conversation with the horse. "The horses are happy here. They are very well cared for."

"You bet they are," Cindy said, her voice full of pride, a tone Rose wouldn't have believed Cindy capable of when she first came to Family Services, half starved, dirty and neglected. She was still skinny, dusty, smudged with straw and horse sweat, but she had made a place for herself, however tenuous. "The first thing the kids learn is feeding, grooming and mucking out Taking care of their tack, that sort of thing."

"Very sensible. Why expect the horse to do anything for you, after all, if you've done nothing for her, right, girl?" she asked, addressing the mare.

Just then another car drove up, a BMW with three giggling young women in it, clad in jodhpurs and hacking jackets.

"You there, girl," one of them shouted rudely. "Miss Carlson would like her horse saddled and bridled and two of your best mounts for ourselves. We will ride now."

"I don't believe this/1 Cindy said, staring at the girls pouring out of the car and sashaying toward the stable while making brittle little jokes among themselves. "It's Pam and Perdita."

"Your stepsisters?" Rose asked. "What are they doing here?"

'Trying to get me canned," Cindy said. "That's Kimmie Carlson, the parks commissioner's daughter, with them."

"Didn't you hear me, girl? I said to prepare our horses," the oldest girl, who had big, expensively coiffed but patently unnatural blonde hair, heavy lips and hard eyebrows snapped again, then said to the small, mousy teenager giggling nervously in the middle, "Really, she's just standing there. What a silly little bitch. I mean, I've heard of hiring the handicapped, but give me a break..."

"Helto, Perdita," Cindy said with fire in'her eye. Rose saw her hand tremble against the neck of the horse she was stroking. "Hello, Pam. Kimmie, I had no idea you knew my stepsisters."

"Such familiarity from the hired help!" Perdita continued.

"Are you just going to stand there all day, or will you get our horses?"

"Otter is in his stall where he usually is and he'll be glad to see you, Kimmie, but no horse in my care gets subjected to these two."

"I beg your pardon, Queen of the Stalls, Miss Horse Manure 19%," Perdita said. "We have Mr. Carlson's express invitation to ride his horses and no stablegirl is going to stop us."

'That's right," the other blonde, who was mercifully quieter, agreed. "So get out of our way."

The Carlson girl, so often bullied herself, saw an opportunity to bully someone else. "Please do as you're told, Cindy. I'll saddle Otter, but Daddy said Perdita and Pam could ride Jelly and Salamander."

"Fine," Cindy said. "Then they can saddle them." She started to turn away, then headed for the stables. "No, I won't do that to Jelly and Salamander. Excuse me, Rose, Felicity."

Pam and Perdita followed her, making snide suggestions the whole way. After a bit Kimmie Carlson led a pretty chocolate-brown gelding out of the stable, and Cindy led a palomino and a pinto, saddled and bridled, behind her.

"Kneel down and help me mount," Perdita commanded.

Wordlessly, her lips tight, cheeks flaming, Cindy knelt and cupped her hands. Perdita kicked them out of the way and stood on first her thigh, then her head, kicking her in the eye on the way up, and the moment she was on the horse, kicked it too so that it ran away, almost trampling Cindy.

"Really, Cindy, what have you been teaching Jelly?" Kimmie Carlson asked.

Cindy was nursing her eye. When Pam started to open her mouth, Rose grabbed a short wooden footstool, plopped it down beside Salamander, and pointed at it. Pam mounted more carefully than her sister and trotted alongside Kimmie up the hill.

'That bitch. That effing bitch," Cindy moaned, holding her eye and trying to saddle an Appaioosa gelding at the same time.

"What are you doing?"

"I have to follow them. Those horses are my responsibility, even if Carlson is crazy enough to loan them to those barracudas."

"Here, dear, allow me," Felicity said, ably saddling and bridling me horse in, if not the twinkling of an eye, at least a good deal quicker than Cindy could have done it with one hand or Rose could have done it at all. "We may as well come with. Whom may we ride?"

"Floss and Andy, there," Cindy said, jerking her head toward two of the horses remaining. The only one not taken was the one with the malformed hoof. Felicity began saddling them, but before she could do so, Cindy was cantering up the trail, behind the other three riders.

Rose and Felicity were just mounting when Perdita, flopping all over the back of her horse, her feet out of the stumps, hanging on for dear life, came galloping back to the stable, her sister and Kirn right behind her and Cindy hot on their trail.

"Oh, help, stop, this beast has gone nuts!" Perdita bellowed. Jelly screeched to a halt when he saw the barn, reared once, and rid himself of his rider, who flopped ingloriously into a pile recently evacuated by either Floss or Andy, Rose wasn't sure which.

"Poor Dita!" Pam said, trying hard not to laugh as she pulled her sister out of the horseshit and wisely refrained from brushing her off. "Kimmie, there was something wrong with that horse of yours," Perdita said. "You don't know this--this stablegirl the way we do. Our mother put a roof over her head and fed and clothed her for years after her father died, and she has always been just as ungrateful, spiteful and malicious as she can be. Why, "11 bet she did something to the horse to make it throw me."

"I wouldn't do anything to one of the horses even if I thought he might kill you!" Cindy growled, jumping down and running to soothe Jelly, whose head Felicity now held. "Kimmie, I tried to tell you. My sisters not only don't know how to ride, they haven't the faintest idea how to treat animals properly. Poor Jelly, quiet now. Are you hurt? Perdita, you're lucky the park has so few trees. If I were Jelly, I'd have rubbed you off on one of the gasworks."

"Oh, you are so cruel," Pam said.

Jelly continued to fuss and Kimmie started to unsaddle him. "Why, look at this! There's a thorn under Jelly's saddle."

Perdita let out a squeal. 'This is it, Cindy. I knew you were jealous of me, but I had no idea you'd stoop to hurting one of the horses to hurt me. Kimmie, you have to call your father right now and demand that this girl be fired, or the stable can no longer use the park. She is a menace and an attempted murderess and--and--should be reported to the Humane Society!"

"Oh, that's what you wanted all along, isn't it?" Cindy cried. "This was all just to get me fired. Kimmie, I'll bet you anything Perdita put the thorn under her own saddle just to have something to accuse me of."

"And be nearly killed for my trouble? As if!" Perdita countered.

Felicity clapped her hands three times. "Ladies. The horses are quite upset enough as it is without you screaming at each other. Kimberly Carlson, you and Cindy and I will return the horses to their stalls and groom them while you, miss," she said to Perdita, "and you," to Pam, "return to your auto and wait. Meanwhile, Rosalie will enjoy her ride as scheduled. Do I make myself clear?"

"Who the hell do you think you are, Mary Poppins?" Perdita snarled, but returned to the car.

"You can't go home again!" The hit man, who had read the phrase in a book somewhere and thought it fit the situation, yelled after Sno as she sprinted off into the woods. He tried to rise to chase her, but as the stunning effect of his fall wore off, he felt a sharp burning pain in his side and when he reached to touch it, his hand came away bloody. He had fallen on the damned blade himself. Who'd think the little bitch had it in her? He wound her red-and-black-checked muffler around his middle to stanch the blood, righted the bike and roared back out of the woods.

He barely managed to stay upright on the bike until he came to Bellingham, where he checked into a clinic, telling the receptionist that the wound was accidental. Even if she had called the cops, which she didn't, he still had the dagger, the wound was clearly self-inflicted, and nobody could nail him for that.

He'd lost a lot of blood but he wasn't about to risk a transfusion, so after they bandaged up the wound, he swung down from the examining table and stalked out again, snagging the blood-soaked black-and-red-checked scarf from the trash can on the way.

The next day he would mail the scarf, complete with dried blood, to Svenny's "niece," whose address was on the permissions letterhead he had shown the school. The scarf would reassure the "niece" that the kill had been made and get him paid. It would also establish evidence to connect to her in case she wanted to contradict him. Maybe she'd have second thoughts before hiring someone to kill her kids for her. Let her do it herself if she wanted the girl dead. She shouldn't have given the kid judo lessons.

The Big Bad

THE WOLF STALKED the underbrush, wary of larger predators while himself searching for prey. The scent of the forest was in his nostrils, snowy, clean, with a spicy-sweet fragrance of woodsmoke from a camp not as far from him as the people there might think.

, His body slunk through the branches without breaking them; his feet trod the ground without marking the fallen leaves that still lay bare under the trees and brush though snow lay farther from the trunks.

Parley Mowat would have loved this wolf. He was actually only looking for rabbits, squirrels, quail, even a deer if he could bring one down. He truly had no conscious designs on human beings--gone were the days when he killed them and took their ears and other parts for bounty.

But when he spotted the flash of red on the trail below and, slithering down to investigate, spied the little figure scrambling furtively up the trail with many glances behind her, old impulses he had hoped were dead rushed up in him. She was alone and stinking of fear, not of him, but of something else. Well, he thought as he grinned his lupine grin to himself, she'd change her mind about that pretty quick. Without a sound he worked his way ahead of her, and when she turned a bend in the path, he stepped out onto the trail in front of her.

"Hi, sweetheart, what brings you to this neck of the woods?" he asked, and closed in for the kill.

She didn't ask what he wanted or beg for mercy or plead innocence or go down on her knees or any of the things he expected. She sure could scream, though.

Sno snapped, screaming at the top of her lungs, picking up handfuls of snow and throwing them in the face of the shaggy-looking man advancing on her with his hands extended and a hideous grin. He had long hair and a long beard and his teeth were yellow, exuding smoker's breath. They looked sharp, and he looked hungry. Wild thoughts of werewolves skimmed the surface of her mind, careening like crazy colors as she screamed over and over again, as much in rage as in fear.

And then he lunged--God, she was really having a bad day--and as his hands closed over her throat, he was lifted off.

Trip-Wire! Hey, Trip-Wire, buddy, come on away from mat little girl. She ain't no gook!" another man said.

Sno wiggled out from under the man and stood back, both hands gripping snowballs so tightly the snow was melting. "What is it with you men today? Full moon? Huh? First that geek on the bike tries to stab me, and now--and now--"

And now rage overtook her and she began to shake and howl a little herself. The shaggy man looked shamefaced and buried his head in the shoulder of the man who had grabbed him, while five other men half-slid, half-ran down the hill behind them.

Thoughts of gang rape and torture murder danced in Sno's head.

"Who the hell are you?" everybody said in unison.

Later, back at the camp, wearing one of Doc's sweaters and a pair of jeans borrowed from Drifty, who was the smallest of the group, and wrapped in a camouflage quilt, Sno finished telling them how she came to be there. She felt better now. Nobody had tried anything fanny. They'd fed her fresh fish and pots of coffee and shot warning looks at each other and protective ones toward her. Trip-Wire, the guy who'd scared her, had apparently had some kinda flashback and thought he was back in the Vietnam War and she was an enemy or something.

He was really sorry, she could tell. Especially when she told them mat she had just escaped the weirdo on the bike with the knife.

"So, who was this guy who was trying to kill you?" the tall bearded one, Doc, asked. God, these guys were old. Older than Raydir, even.

"Never saw him before in my life," Sno told him. "And he was wearing a helmet, so I couldn't see his face. But something he said--"

"What?" Dead-Eye, the crewcut with the eyepatch, asked. "What did the bastard say to you, honey?"

"He--he said I shouldn't go home again. He said he didn't want to kill me, but somebody with connections wanted me dead."

"You think you know who it is?"

She nodded. "Gerardine. Raydir's wife. She hates me, and I never did anything to her, I swear."

"Gerardine?" asked Maurice, the black guy the others called "Doper," when they forgot that he preferred his given name. "The model? She's your stepmom?"

"Yeah."

"Well, darlin', it's perfectly obvious to me why the woman wouldn't be able to stand you," Maurice said. "You're competition, love. Absolutely stunning, and she is, frankly, getting on a bit. The woman must be thirty-five if she's a day."

"Forty-three," Sno said. .

"No! You don't say!"

Sno nodded. "I mean, you can hardly tell, because she's always got on all the makeup and stuff. And I'm no competition--I don't want all those guys bothering me. I'm just thirteen, and I want to go to college. I like boys and all mat, but only when they're really nice, and a lot of the ones at Raydir's house aren't. They just grab."

"Anybody bring the signal flares?" Doc asked. "We better call in the troopers."

"No!" Sno said. "They'll take me home."

"Not if you tell them what happened."

"They won't believe me," Sno told him.

"Because they'll think you're the spoiled rich kid of famous parents?"

"No, 'cause I got busted a while back for doing drugs and I'm on probation now. God, I wish I had a joint."

"Me too," the seven vets said in unison.

"But we're done with that stuff now," Doc said. "And you should be too. None of that crap's good for you, and we ought to know. Anyway, we have to call the troopers. You can't stay here."

"Why not?"

" 'Cause this is a men's retreat. We're living barracks style. There's no room for a girl."

"Huh!" she said. "One of those 'no girls allowed' clubs. That is so sexist and so unfair. Besides," she said, her voice dropping, "I've got noplace else to go. If you turn me over to the troopers, I'll be dead." Doc folded his arms and looked at the ground. The others avoided her eyes when she tried to plead with them. Her voice broke. "So, okay, what do I have to do to stay alive? Cook? Clean? Give you blow jobs? What?"

"Don't," said Doc, "tempt us. This is tough enough as it is."

"I can't go back there. I can't." The events of the day, the knife, the long bike ride, all closed in on her. "I thought I wanted to die when Mama was killed, but I don't. I don't. I don't."

Maurice stepped forward and enveloped her in a hug. "Oh, come on, fellows. I was getting tired of all of this smglemindedly hairy-chested stuff anyway. What's getting in touch with your warrior self good for if you can't protect a little girl in trouble? Can't she stay? She could sleep with me and, as you know, she'd be safe as with her own--well, safer than with her stepmom. She'd be the daughter, the little sister I never had."

"Oh, cut it out, Maurice, and let the kid go," Doc said. "We agreed that this was for us alone. We didn't even bring our own sons--we sure don't need a sweet young thing, even if she does have a mouth on her like a Marine. She'd get us all in deep shit."

"So what?" said Trip-Wire, who hadn't said a word since they returned to camp. "It's not like we ain't been there before."

"So?" Rose asked, when she and Felicity were back on 99 headed toward downtown Seattle. She had ridden away from the stable as Felicity suggested, because although she had qualms about leaving Cindy to the mercies of the stepsisters, the empty-headed Carlson girl, and the possibly psychotic Felicity, she had needed to clear her head. When she returned from her trot around the park, she saw that the BMW was gone, the horses were groomed, and Cindy and Felicity were chatting happily while oiling and polishing tack.

Cindy polished with a rather determinedly grim set to her mouth, a tension that was the aftermath of her encounter with Perdita and Pammie. Felicity proposed that they all go to dinner, and they repaired to Jake's Place where the food was so good it was almost magical, Rose had to admit. The meal lightened Cindy's mood a bit. Good meals were not something she took for granted.

After dinner, Rose was so sleepy from the exercise, fresh air and good food that she sat in happy, dazed silence, as Felicity and Cindy continued to talk horses until the restaurant closed, and they dropped Cindy off at the tiny basement apartment she was house-sitting on Burke Avenue North in Wallingford.

"So what?"

"So did you wave your wand, say any magic words, make sure things would all turn out right for Cindy?"

"No, but I promised to speak to her employer if those little tarts made trouble."

"That's all?" Rose surprised herself by blurting out. To her chagrin, she found she was actually disappointed. Felicity was such good company, and so practical and ordinary about horses and that sort of thing, that she had stopped thinking of her as a harmless nut and more as a charming eccentric. Well, she was British and apparently well off. Didn't that qualify her to be eccentric? But somewhere along the line, while talking to the woman, Rose had begun to accept all the stuff about magic the same way she would a friend talking about an interest in shell collecting or bungee jumping, which was certainly crazier than anything Felicity had brought up so far. And now she was unhappy because the woman had, naturally enough, not produced. So which of them had failed to keep both oars in the water, hmmm? Nevertheless ...

"Yes, that, and I plan to bring her employer's establishment a great deal of business," Felicity continued in a quite sane way.

"I thought you were going to prove your magic powers to me," Rose challenged. Maybe it was wrong to try to get somebody to leap back into the chasm between them and reality again, but she was beginning to feel as if she had imagined their original conversation, and she wanted to keep all of this clear. Really, she ought to be glad Felicity hadn't driven her to a bluff somewhere and driven off, expecting the car to turn into a dragon or something.

"Just my powers. Remember, I told you that we only use the least possible magical force to do a job."

Rose just stopped herself from crying, "Aha!"

Felicity continued, "Your friend Cindy seems to me to be managing admirably on her own, despite the formidable opposition, and isn't that what you modern girls expect of yourselves?"

Rose felt defensive now on Cindy's behalf as well as her own. "You've got no idea of the hell she's been through, of what she's up against," she said.

"She told me. But she's persevering."

"Well, that's nice." Drop it, Rosie. Drop it, she told herself, but she found she had developed a morbid fascination with the subject, with confronting Felicity with the difference between what she believed she was and could do and what she was actually doing. "But weren't you going to prove to me that you were the fairy godmother by making everything like a fairy tale and providing happy endings?"

"I don't have to make everything like a fairy tale. It already is, if only you knew," Felicity said with a strange, grim set to her mouth. "As for my role, I'm here to help you and those who can benefit from my assistance. Even if I had unlimited powers, I couldn't do anything for some of your clients. Those who are more than a little mad, those who find their magic in chemicals of one sort or another, are not clear enough to receive or use the assistance I can offer. Neither can I undo the effects of AIDS or other terminal illnesses. I cannot replace limbs or restore life to the dead. But there are a great many good things remaining, including one thing that seems to be very much missing these days ..."

"Yes?"

Felicity sighed and tossed her silvery hair, and took her eyes from the highway for a moment to fix them on Rose with a penetrating stare. "Romance."

"Romance? When what we need is soup kitchens and housing and medicine and treatment programs and shelters and education?"

Felicity shrugged. "I didn't say you don't need those things too, but nonetheless, just as much, romance."

That did it! Felicity was definitely out of touch with reality after all. In her most therapeutic voice, with a touch of the humor Felicity seemed well able to tolerate, Rose gently explained, "It is true, Felicity, that nowadays, in this country at least, we don't wait for princes to come to the rescue much anymore. They're in short supply these days, and it's a long wait and 'happily ever after,' frankly, is a literary device."

"How very sophisticated of you," Felicity said stiffly. "But honestly, Rose, what would you know about it?"

"Romance? I've had my ..."

"No, the way relationships work in fairy tales. I suggest you do some research before you continue with the world-weary remarks as if you invented disappointment. It isn't becoming, it isn't therapeutic and it isn't useful."

"Well, excu-use me," Rose said, stung more than she would have imagined. "Now, then, if you don't mind, I have quite a lot to do if I'm to be of help. Here's the ferry terminal. I think you'll find the 11:15 was late in docking and will be waiting for you if you hurry."

"Gee, promise me if we don't reach Bremerton by midnight you won't turn the ferry into a pumpkin. That's a long, cold swim."

"Very funny."

The wind was rising and the night sky spitting freezing rain by the time Rose drove up to her half-renovated house.

She'd stopped by the mailbox on the way, but there was nothing but a new Spiegel's sale catalog, three bills, and a postcard. There was, however, a plastic bag with the rectangular outline of a package poking its way through the bottom hanging from her doorknob. A furry face peered anxiously through the glass door and her senior cat, Oprah, a sleek brown Siamese mix, nearly tripped her as she stepped inside.

Dumping everything on the kitchen table, she scurried to turn up the furnace and use the bathroom, to which she was followed by Oprah and the other two cats, Sally Jessy and Kiil, rubbing, purring, mewing at her not to forget her most important responsibilities. This in spite of the fact that they had dishes full of dry cat food and water at all times.

Since she didn't have to get up the next day and had slept in a bit that morning, she put the kettle on for diet hot chocolate and lit a fire in her fireplace. Her house had been a real find--a stone farmhouse, two stones, all wood interior with this terrific stone fireplace. She'd started a little remodeling with money she'd inherited when her mother died. Downstairs, the kitchen was roomy and convenient, the living room cozy with the fireplace as its centerpiece, a patio, a glassed-in porch, and a former bedroom she used as a library, plus a bathroom that was much more adequate since the remodeling. Upstairs were her room, a guest room, and an extra room in which she kept her vintage clothing and jewelry, plus a fourth former bedroom now made into a decadent master bath complete with double sinks, shower and Jacuzzi tub. She, of all people, did not need a personal fairy godmother, she thought with some satisfaction.

When the chocolate was made and the fire was laid, she turned her attention to the mail and to the parcel on the doorknob. Opening the plastic sack and peeking inside, she saw a package wrapped like a birthday present in shiny paper and iridescent ribbon. Opening it, she found a large secondhand volume of Grimm's Fairy Tales.

"Now how did she ... 7" Rose muttered to herself as she flung the paper aside. There was no card and no inscription. Of course, the book could have come from Linden, with whom she'd had the first conversation about fairy godmothers, but Linden would have sent a card as well and sent it UPS. She always used UPS. But if it hadn't come from Linden, there could only be one other person, and that seemed close to impossible. She smiled. It was a nice book and a good joke anyway.

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Elizabeth Ann Scarborough - The Godmother

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